Have you reviewed the census enumerations of your ancestral aunts and uncles? Are there boarders living with them? Is it possible that person is a relative even if the census does not mention that relationship. This 1860 enumeration for my uncle Henry Trautvetter contains two other household members who could be clues.
Or they could be relatives of his wife.
Or they could be totally unrelated.
I’ll never know if I don’t research them as well.
7 Responses
On my family tree database, I have a field “Relationship to head of household “. This can contain data such as “Visitor = Grandson”, where visitor is on the record, but my research shows it is a grandson.
The 1910 census shows my grandfather as a 2 yr old living with his parents and his mother’s widowed grandmother. She wasn’t related to the head of the household, so it was probably easier to write “boarder” as opposed to wife’s grandmother. The enumerator probably figured it didn’t matter since no one would ever be looking at this information again anyway…or so he thought 🙂
Sometimes the census taker was only thinking of the present. 😉
This is a good comment and it works to check it out. Thru the years I have found the wives maiden Surname by checking someone “called a Boarder”. In other cases it gives me the married surname of another female sibling for either parent and in other cases it proved to be the Surname of the wife’s former husband who was killed in the Civil War. It is a Tip that one should not overlook.
Good examples. Sometimes a boarder is just a boarder, but one never knows until one looks.
I have hit a brick wall with the maiden name of my g.g. grandmother. In the 1850 census 2 children were living with them with a different last name. I searched those names, found their family, and found they were not a relative of hers. Her husband was listed as a teacher. Upon contacting a genealogy society in that county I found that in that time and place teachers would board and teach students. So I still do not know her maiden name.
After searching for some time for my grandfather’s brother, Oscar Workman, & not finding him in the 1910 census when he, his wife, & numerous children had been listed in the same Nebraska town in 1900 & 1920, I searched for the boarder.
It turned out that my uncle’s family name had been transcribed as Clarkman, not Workman. The census taker had very florid handwriting, so the transcriber could not be blamed, but I was grateful that the family had a long-term boarder.