When that widowed relative “disappears,” it’s plausible that they wen
Seattle Times, 9 October 1940, page 13.
t to live with or near a child. The Tjede Ehmen mentioned in this clipping is
enumerated in the 1920 through 1940 censuses with a child in Moline, Illinois, and died in Seattle, Washington, in the 1940s where another child lived.
This item was obtained on GenealogyBank.
4 Responses
I’ve been searching for my ft-gt-grandmother for over 25 years. She “disappeared” after 1900 census. At that time she was living in household of her youngest son in Knox Co KY. I’ve searched her other children but didn’t find her. I would dearly love to find out what happened to her. Nancy Crook married Elijah Hammons/Hammond in 1839 Knox Co KY. They moved to Orange Co IN in early 1860’s. He died 1876 and she returned to KY. Is in 1900 census widowed in household of son David Wiley Hammons. She’s not with him in 1910 census. There’s multiple Nancys and Elijah’s throughout the generations so I’ve been careful in my search. Someone claimed a 1934 deat incorrect date for her on their Ancestry.com tree which is actually her daughter’s death certificate. She is worse than a brick wall for me, she is a black hole. I dearly want to find her death date and place of burial. Thank you for any help.
Did she remarry?
Did she go to live with a granddaughter…making it more difficult to spot a surname too?
Or with a granddaughter who remarried…making it very much more difficult to spot the surname?
Is she in Find a Grave? (I’d look in the cemeteries of areas where there were kids/grandkids.)
Have you contacted any known descendants to see if they know? (Not necessarily the info on Ancestry.)
Could she have died in a state hospital, or on a poor farm, or any such thing? Maybe a hospital? Maybe while traveling from one family residence to another and no one knew who to contact? Accidents happen to and who would know where the woman hit by the train might be from, might be named?
Have you checked appropriate census records where all the kids were living? If with a granddaughter with a different surname, grandmother’s known surname could be quietly hidden on a line.
Is her name simply misspelled on a record? (I am stunned by the number of 1930 names that the census taker misspelled in my hometown–and she was a woman who went to school, had lived there all her life, and her husband was the editor of the local paper. How could she make so many errors!?! It is certainly worth watching for.
Theoretically, the census taker was to get the names of everyone living in the household on the day s/he was there. If Grandma had gone to visit another child, or to spend the night at a neighbor’s to help with the butchering, or to be elsewhere because the weather turned too bad to come home that evening…whatever little surprise that would seem as “nothing” to the family then, can now look as if Grandma is ‘gone’. She just may be next door helping with the canning.
The census was not always taken at the same day everywhere. In my family, at least one of my great-grandmothers & a great-great uncle were counted twice because they were counted as part of two families as they reached old age. Even though the census takers were instructed to include only the people present that day, that was obviously modified to include people who were at work. I have heard that census takers were paid by the number of people they enumerated, so they might have been eager to boost the total. Many may have asked for the names & other details of the people who lived in the household. Some enumerated the people who normally lived in a household; others included anyone who were oresent on census day.