I was convinced that I could see my mother in a recently discovered picture of her great-great-grandmother. I was certain there was no other opinion. Without telling her what I thought, asked my daughter who she thought the woman in the picture resembled. I was certain she would say “Grandma.” I was positive. She didn’t. And she rattled off the name of another family member. After thinking for a minute, I could see it. I was so set in my initial view that I was unable to see anything else. Sometimes you need to hear a different perspective, listen to it, and contemplate it. In the end you may not agree with the alternate interpretation, but being challenged and thoughtfully considering the possibility there’s another interpretation besides yours […]
I hear the following all the time, but sometimes it can be difficult to believe it: have patience keep looking something may turn up And sure enough it did–a picture of my third great-grandparents on Famil ySearch. I’ve researched these people since the early 1980s and this is the first time I have seen a picture of them. I could barely contain my excitement. But…it does not look like the mental pictures of them I had in my head. But I’ll take it.
Is it possible that your person of interest had a short-term marriage, perhaps after a longer one that resulted from the death of a spouse. A relative, shortly after his wife of twenty years died, married a local woman in the 1870s only to divorce her within a year. His family never mentioned her as if it never happened. The divorce records were quite informative and would not have been located had I not just decided to look “just in case.”
Newspaper writeups of funerals may give additional clues as to survivors. Pallbearers may be more distant family members who are not named in the obituary. Most of the men listed in the 1962 example were nephews of the deceased–there’s just one that I have to figure out who he is. Genealogy Tip of the Day is sponsored by GenealogyBank –give them a try today.
When you transcribe a document, do you make a notation if some of the handwriting appears significantly different from the rest of it? Different handwriting indicates a different person did the writing–at least most of the time. Multiple “authors” could have written on a document at different points in time, had varying levels of knowledge regarding the document’s content, or served different positions in the agency that created or maintained the record. Sometimes that really matters.
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