Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Sharing information is a two-way street

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I visited my parents earlier this month in Walla Walla, Washington, and as I posted last month, I was hoping to get some more family-history information from them.

Well, it turns out they didn’t know the answers to most of my questions (perhaps I’m asking the wrong questions), though my mom was able to fill in the information that her cousin, Jerry Brown, had asked about in a comment to that earlier post.

(Confidential to Jerry: My grandfather, Crawford Brown’s fuel business was called International Fuel and its address was 730 North Washington in Spokane. And my mother’s childhood home, which you visited in around 1949, was E 30 31st also in Spokane.)

But even if I didn’t get my own questions answered, I was able to share information with my mother about what I’d learned about our family history since my last visit. A large part of that was due to the above-named Jerry Brown and his sister, Judy, who generously shared their genealogical information about my mother’s paternal side of the family. That includes a delightful oral history and it was really fun to share that with my mother. I also shared the emails I had received from her cousins when Jerry first found this blog.

So thank you, Jerry and Judy. I appreciate your help. And I appreciate the reminder that even if my mother’s not in a position to further my research, I can enhance her life by sharing what I learned.

I just started a Facebook page for this blog. If you’re on Facebook, please hop over there and like it. I’ll be posting links to blog posts and starting conversations.

I love a mystery

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I think one of the reasons I enjoy genealogy research so much is that it makes me feel like a detective. The mysteries can be frustrating, but solving them is oh so satisfying.

Today’s mystery: the death date of my great, great grandmother, Antoinette Garlock Brown. I thought I had it nailed. She died in Missouri in 1922, so I had easy access to her death certificate. (In fact, I blogged about finding her death certificate in a blog post called Those Darn Nicknames.) The hand-written death certificate lists January 9, 1922 as her date of death. The filing date is listed as January 11, 1922. It didn’t seem ambiguous to me.

Today, I found a photograph of her headstone at Find A Grave. It clearly states her date of death as February 9, 1922. It’s etched in stone, so it feels very official. I also have a yellowed newspaper clipping of her obituary, which was found among my grandmother’s belongings after she passed away. It, too, lists her date of death as February 9. Unfortunately, that clipping doesn’t show the date of the newspaper nor the name of the newspaper.

When I squinted harder at the death certificate, it started to become a little more equivocal. It looks like the undertaker wrote the bulk of the information, but the medical examiner is the one who filled in the dates. Under age, the undertaker wrote 66 years, 5 months, 26 days. Since she was born August 13, 1855, that would make her death date February 9. Is it possible that the medical examiner got his months mixed up and no one noticed?

I spent some time trying to locate any other record of her death, so far to no avail. I searched for an obituary to try to get a newspaper date (if that obit appeared in January, clearly it would be wrong). It’s hard for me to imagine that both the obituary and the headstone are wrong. But it’s also hard to imagine the medical examiner not knowing what month it is.

I’m bound and determined to solve this mystery. I can’t wait to find out what the answer (and perhaps explanation) is. And when I do I’ll report it here!

Making connections

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Brown family, before trip to Nebraska, 1922

1922. My grandfather, Crawford Brown, is the boy on the left. The family drove that car to Nebraska from Missouri shortly after.

So far, for me, genealogy has been a fairly solitary pursuit. That’s kind of how I like things. I like to go at my own pace and I tend to stick to myself.

That’s not necessarily a good idea, as I discovered this week. On Sunday, I was contacted through this blog by my mother’s first cousin, Jerry Brown, who, along with his sister, Judy, has done extensive genealogical research. We corresponded a little, and then he introduced me via email to a whole bunch of Brown cousins, including some who live in the area I’m hoping to visit on a research trip, and they’ve been reaching out to me. (You can read a couple of the comments I received from them in the comments on this post.)

It’s been wonderful–what a friendly and loving family. They shared reminiscences of my grandparents (their aunt and uncle) and also shared some amazing family photos, including the wonderful photo above, which was sent to me by John Laflen.

The Browns have been so wonderful, it makes me want to reach out to other parts of my family, too.

If you’re reading this and you’re one of my Brown cousins, thank you! I look forward to meeting you in person. If you happen to be related to another part of my family, please feel free to leave a comment. I’m so glad that Jerry Brown did.

Planning a genealogy research trip

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I live in St. Louis and my maternal roots go back to western Missouri. My mother was born in Jefferson City, but moved to Spokane, Washington, in 1936 with her family. I grew up in Washington and always knew I had Missouri cousins. Though I’ve lived in Missouri for 23 years, I’ve yet to seek out those cousins, nor travel to the area (some four or five hours away) to try to track down genealogy records.

But now that I’m back into the family history research, I’m itching to go on a genealogy research trip. Looking at my calendar, I see that I have three free days next week, so the thought occurred to me that that might be just the time to take a little road trip to look into the Browns and the Jeffries.

Of course, as an organized person, I know that such a research trip will require some planning if it’s going to be productive. But I have to admit that when I think about planning it, my head starts spinning a little. So I figure what I need to do before I take such a trip is the following:

  • See how many of the four western Missouri counties in my database I can realistically fit in a quick trip
  • Choose the counties I’d like to visit
  • Figure out what family members I’d like to research, what records I already have and what I’d like to track down
  • Locate the cemeteries where I know folks were buried, based on death certificates
  • Create a list of other family members who might be buried in those cemeteries
  • Find out where I might be able to obtain the records I seek
  • Know just what I’m looking for when I go to courthouses or libraries
  • Figure out where to stay
  • Figure out driving routes
  • Ask my mother for names of cousins I might reach out to

When I write it all down like that, the spinning in my head slows down somewhat. I need to remind myself that I don’t have to get everything done in one visit. I can take plenty more road trips. But I do want to put some planning into my first one so that it’s at least somewhat productive.

This sounds like great fun. I will post the results (and some photos) here, after the research trip takes place!