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My great-grandfather has been a mystery for years, partially because of my own fault.
I thought he was born in my area about 1909, because his kids were born in 1939 and 1943. I found a man by his similar name (last name spelled different) born in 1909 in a neighboring county.
I went with that for a while, but I didn't feel comfortable with it, so I didn't pursue it much further.
Anyway, my grandmother told me where her father was born. I went to findagrave and found it. Lo and behold, he was born in 1900. Neither I nor my grandmother thought he was that old.
So I did a familysearch search. I know that site is not always 100% accurate, but it gives me something to go off of. I found my great-grandfather's parents and grandparents. His grandfather was born in England. My great-grandfather had always said he was English.
Anyway, I found out that my great-great-grandfather was a confectioner in St. Louis, which is pretty neat. I found the findagrave records for my great-grandfather's parents and their death certificates on sos.mo.gov.
Not finding this before was partly because of my own assumptions (I assumed he was not as old as he was and I also accepted a record for a similar name, assuming it was a census mistake or he changed his name). Anyway, I found the right path to take. Hopefully I can take it a little farther. As of right now, as of the census, I have gone back to 1850. I'm not sure if I can trace it back to England or not, though I know the people's names and dates of birth.
Anyway, this was my breakthrough and my "Duh!" moment. Why didn't I check findagrave before? Why did I assume his name would be different on the census? I made it harder than it had to be.
That is fantastic news STLCardsBlues1989! Let me know if you want some help breaking through into British research. I'm pretty familiar with it due to all my British ancestors, plus, I lived in the country for 8 years. I also run a UK Genealogy group which has been going strong for nearly 8 years and has some fantastic researchers in the UK as members
Some good places to start with your English ancestors...
Don't feel too bad. I did that once, gave up a lead and went back to it later. Probably others do, too, sometimes.
As I've said before, I have had great luck with just plain ol' Google. I plug in the same difficult names and some associated words month after month, and in many cases year after year....and then one day BINGO!!! Someone or some organization has posted something new that mentions this person.
There was a very distant relative with a slew of kids still alive (probably)...never, never could find more than I already had. But her maiden name was rather odd. Last week I plugged it into Google again for the umpteenth time.
And I found a goldmine - unfortunately under extremely sad circumstances. This woman had five daughters, and just two days before I looked on Google again one of her daughters had lost a very young child to a rare disease. The child's obituary was on a newspaper site and it contained many, many facts on the family that I did not have.
I'm working on some of the links, but some don't start until 1837, which won't give me a birth record for my ancestor. Maybe I can find other stuff, though.
I'm not sure when he left England. His wife was born in 1832 and she was born in England. Their first kid was born 1854 in Missouri. I'm not sure if George met his wife in England or over here.
Well, you've learned the same lesson I have, but at least youalso finally listened to your gut instinct. For over 20 years I looked for the record of death for my great-great-grandfather, who was married to the infamous Lizzie, who ran the house of prostitution. I was convinced he either had run FAR, FAR away or that Lizzie had killed him and buried him in the Pine Barrens. The information, or lack thereof which threw me off the trail was this...
Last census that Joseph appeared in from the area I was searching was the 1895 NJ State Census.
Lizzie listed herself in the later census records as widowed.
But, inspite of Lizzie listing herself as a widow I still could not find any mention of Joseph's death in the local newspapers for that area, no death certificate was found for between the years 1895 to 1900, and no burial could be found in the local cemeteries.
Something just did not feel right, so I continued to search census records throughout the United States. I did come across a Joseph FORD who was in the right age range, who was listed as a widower and sharing a home with his widowed sister-in-law. I ignored that census because it was in a neighboring county where this particular family didn't really have any connection, as far as I was aware. But something kept drawing me back to that census record.
I finally decided to trace the sister-in-law that this Joseph was living with, and lo and behold, her deceased husband was named George. My Joseph had a brother named George! Well, after YEARS of ignoring this Jospeh I finally had my NJ contact go to the State Archives to find a record of death for this particular Joseph. BINGO!!! It was indeed him as everything matched perfectly on the death record, from date and place of birth to the names of both parents, which I already knew. My Joseph didn't die between 1895 to 1900, he died in 1924 at the Atlantic County Insane Asylum in 1924 due to dementia and kidney disease. I received his death certificate two weeks ago
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