SEARCH FOR HERITAGE - ORPHANAGE - ADOPTION - LOVING HOME Research Path Heritage Search 1 - Three

Since the surname of the birth mother - her maiden name - seems to be the one she went through life with - I search for her grave using FIND A GRAVE.  

I would not have found it if I had not known the name of the birth father!

To my surprise I find both her maiden surname and the name of the birth father who never married her (unless he was a bigamist which no longer seems likely) on the tombstone as if they were married. I also now have a full birth and death date.  If I get the burial record it's going to tell me who informed the undertaker. Tombstones are generally not inexpensive so someone had this carved. But would the funeral home do research to prove that this woman was indeed MARRIED and had a married surname?  NO, they would not. So someone paid for her funeral and someone paid to have this gravestone made. I asked my client if he buried his mother.  He doesn't take the bait. (Information on tombstones can be wrong.)

Also, on FIND A GRAVE I see that someone responsible for photographing and listing the grave has put down that she was the child of "Bob and Mary So and So."  Who is this person?  I click on his info and he's someone who has uploaded thousands of photos of graves and so on. He probably is not a family member with a personal interest in this. I doubt that he has also looked at cemetery records and other paperwork. Is he a relative?  Perhaps from that birth father's side of the family? 

Turns out that birth father and his legal wife are in the same cemetery.  

Well, there are not too many cemeteries around in that area and now that I know that this birth mother lived her life alone and unmarried - that he was LOCAL all those years - well, I feel upset. The birth father never visited the birth mother, who remained unmarried her whole life. He must have known where she was. I wonder.  Did she tell people she was a divorced woman when she was not?  Use his surname? 

What's going on?

I locate the couple that are attributed to be the birth mother's own birth parents according to the FIND A GRACE listing on census in another state, along with dozens of other prospective families. By now I feel pretty sure that it's my client himself who did the funeral, burial, and the tombstone, and maybe he's forgotten or he doesn't want to discuss it.  (Is he playing a game with me to see if I'm a good genealogist?)

It's important that he be honest with me. Now I begin to wonder if his birth mother was honest with him. I begin to wonder if anyone at the orphanage or her birth family were honest with her as well because...

I run a search for everyone in the United States born in the year she was using the 1930 census, when she was already a child and in the Catholic orphanage or a mid-west city. Up come dozens of families who already had a child in or about 1924. Unless she was a TWIN and was given away while the other twin was kept, she does NOT FIT INTO THE BIRTH ORDER of ANY OF THESE FAMILIES who are located in the same diocese - the diocese that was behind the Catholic Orphanage she lived her childhood in.  

This opens the possibility that though all oral history and evidence thus far points to her being connected to the dozens of families there with her birth surname, she may actually have been sent there to them from somewhere else.  I remind myself not to get map bound.

But there is ONE candidate family in the area simply because there are no children listed born in that family after the date she was born....


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To follow along on this genealogy research path click on the label below that says Research Path Heritage Search 1

THREE DNA TESTS LATER HE KNOWS WHY HIS GREAT GRANDFATHER WAS MEAN TO HIS GREAT GRANDMOTHER

Got to talking to a man at a coffee house who brightened when I told him I do genealogy research and family history writing.  He was just waiting to tell someone who would understand.

He took DNA tests from three different companies and learned that genetically as of his great grandmother's line, he is NOT a member of a particular Scottish Clan /Surname but another.

"I always heard that my great grandfather treated her like crap," he said.  "She was young and pretty, maybe 21, and clearly she had an affair. I had to tell my mom."

This is one of the reasons why some people don't want to take a DNA test, do not want to know.

His mother had invested in so many clan logo designed items from coffee mugs to crests on the walls.

HILDA THE DRUID FACE RECONSTRUCTION - SHE LOOKS LIKE SOMEONE YOU KNOW FROM CHURCH

I love face reconstructions...  Go to this Daily Mail UK Article and there's a video about how it's done too.  She's 60 and toothless but that's twice as long as people probably lived.

DAILY MAIL UK : HILDA THE DRUID FACIAL RECONSTRUCTION

EXCERPT: The face of an elderly female druid known as Hilda who lived in Scotland around 1, 500 years ago has been recreated as part of a student's university project.   Karen Fleming of the University of Dundee has recreated the head of Hilda, believed to have been from Stornway on the Isle of Lewis, who was in her 6O's when she died

I'M FOR the CITIZENSHIP QUESTION on U.S. CENSUS and AGAINST REPARATIONS - HEAR ME OUT

A friend I talked to said a Japanese friend of hers, whose parents were relocated during World War II and lost everything, refuses to cooperate with the U.S. Census because he says our government used it to locate Japanese-Americans or Japanese aliens to do this. I'm not sure officials did use the census to locate Japanese people or Japanese-Americans for the purpose of relocation. I realize this was a terrible experience for those effected by it - whole communities.

I know that here and now, if there were any group to be targeted for any purpose whatsoever, there would be ways to find those in the group. The fact is, there are other ways to locate people these days besides a census, many more ways. 

I suspect that back in the day authorities knew where ethnic groups were ghettoized or where they preferred to live, among others who spoke the same language and had the same cultural expectations.  My own ancestors lived in these ethnic ghettos as immigrants.

Our multiculturalism and mixing no longer guarantees that a given name or a surname identifies the person on a census as one ethnicity or another. Therefore I wonder about the validity of "identity politics."  Are we not creatures of personality and character and soul and not just what we appear on the surface to be?  Our own self-identity is what matters to us now. Besides thinking or feeling yourself to be a certain race or ethnicity though the facts (such as a DNA test or genealogy research) may indicate that you are a mix, that self identity also includes our gender and sexual orientation. The fact is that census takers used observation to determine that someone was male or female, W, M, or C, back in the day.  (And I've seen the person considered C or M in the South to be considered W in the North on census.)

I had a client who immediately assumed because some names of his ancestors were German that they were Jewish. He was wrong. I asked my friend who is upset about the Japanese internment, well what if they used the census to identify and locate Jews for round up? She gulped.

What is the purpose of a census?  It's statistical. It is used to determine what's what - what's needed - and to ask for money from the government (as well as common citizens through taxation or donations) for various purposes and to make policy.

Certainly no census has ever been done for the purposes of future genealogy buffs. 

An example that many Americans can understand is homeless counts, which are usually under counts since many homeless people do not cooperate or cannot be found to be counted.  Agencies and the government look to this count to ask for and get funding appropriate to their location. They don't get enough money to deal with all the people who come through their doors asking for help because maybe a third of those who are actually homeless were counted.

We can't know if we will be for or against any particular change that might be based on census, but we certainly would like to know how many citizens there are so we can also know how many are voting.  We'd like to know how many children live in a district to plan for their education.  And I think we'd like to know how many people are living in the U.S. who want to be citizens.

Several years ago I met a school teacher who showed up to teach in the fall and had an almost empty classroom.  Due to housing costs many students had left that school and their parents seemed to not have re-enrolled them elsewhere as there had been no requests to have grades or other documents transferred to another district. (It was assumed that these families had become homeless and not enrolled their children in any school.)

And there is a precedent as any genealogist who uses the past U.S. Census knows of asking these questions: Are you an alien? In process of citizenship? What year did you become a citizen? (And we genealogists depend on these documents to find out where people came from so we can cross the ocean with our research.)

I once wondered if my own ancestors hid out, afraid to answer the door because of the conditions they lived in prior to America, but I did find them - their surname horribly misspelled - on one of those pages that is faded and damaged.

There is also a historical precedent for blocking or not allowing the citizenship process to go forwards which prevented those of a certain ethnicity - including mine - to be considered a potential threat to the security of the United States because of World War I. Thus some immigrants who wanted citizenship years earlier had to wait until after that war.

As for reparations, I cannot even imagine how we would decide who deserves "reparations" for slavery prior to the Emancipation decades ago other than using DNA tests and coming up with some mathematical formula for how many dollars for what percentage of slave-identified genetics. And what of so many of us who never owned slaves and come from families that never owned slaves?  Why would we pay, assume we are "guilty" of enslaving for our skin color, and owe others based on their racial identity because of our racial identity?  That's not fair.  I'm not responsible for what anyone in my family history (and mine came here after the abolishment of slavery) did in the past.  I'm not responsible for the actions of people I never met and wasn't raised by. I'm only responsible as an adult for my own actions in this life. 

As they say, you can't choose your family, you can only choose your friends. I don't want to punish others for their ancestry any more than I want to punish some upstanding citizen who happens to have a criminal in the family. What about those people who have slave heritage but generations later have moved beyond it or those who have African heritage but were never slaves? 

Should those of Catholic heritage ask for reparations from WASPS because they were horribly exploited by the Robber Barons as immigrants (pre-union) who worked six days a week, back to back "shifts" of 14-16 hours, for example?  

When does prejudice end?  

It ends with our personal behavior in this life.

One person mentioned to me the reparations for Jews who's families were killed in the Holocaust or had property seized.  While I don't know exactly how that worked in Germany - or Israel - there are some differences.

The first is that living people were able to PROVE what they lost, mostly because it was fairly recent history, so names, photographs, addresses, titles to property and so on could be used. Secondly, Jewish-Americans have told me that they did not ALL get the money. Rather one person in their family proved what they had lost, did the applications and got whatever was offered.  So they would say to me, "I didn't apply because so and so already got the money." And it was generally not much.  Generally it was a token - a token apology of sorts.

It's not that I don't have a heart.  I'd rather see the money spent on education and other programs to help those who need help here and now, no matter what their heritage.

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This post was edited for clarity on September 3, 2019

THE COUNTRY LANE

SEARCH FOR HERITAGE - ORPHANAGE - ADOPTION - LOVING HOME Research Path Heritage Search 1 - Two

Since I had the real names of both birth parents for the man who wants to know of his heritage on his birth mother's side, the first thing I did was check the census records.  I found the father and his family on them right away. One could easily go back four generations or more using those. Since the focus is on his birth mother's line I wouldn't have bothered with his father's side except that there was a possibility of bigamy.  

I found only one marriage attributed to the birth father, the marriage he stayed in for a lifetime. He was clearly married when he had the affair that brought a son into this world. I do not think there was any marriage or divorce of this man's birth parents and therefore no bigamy as I've found no evidence of it.

Knowing that World War II was brewing, I wondered if the birth father had enlisted. Oddly, I did not find any enlistment or draft records (such as the sign up) for him. Marriage would not have been reason enough to avoid either. Perhaps there was some other reason why not. I'm going to go into more locally held resources than rely on databases. (Update August 13th, 2019 - I did find his military record for WWII on the database called FOLD3.)

I was able to confirm that the birth mother was indeed an orphan from a young age by finding her on both the 1930 and 1940 census in the Catholic orphanage of a large mid-western city. The name of the institution was there on the census, and I was able to find a history of that place and the children they took in. Since the family was Catholic and near a large city, the story goes that her widowed father took her there and that he visited for a while until he died. We knew that she had probably lived there her entire life and no one had adopted her.

The history site that included historical information on the orphanage warned that there was limited information available for genealogical purposes. We may still contact them just to see what they might have. Of course, we would love to know exactly when she was placed there, possibly as an infant, and who signed her in, who took her there, and if they have any notes about visits.

I asked the man if he had his mother's death certificate or birth certificate. He said he did but then got back to me and said he did not. We could get a copy of her death record and her burial record. And I feel this will be essential. As for her birth certificate, that's possible too.  But first I checked to see if an index of birth records for her state and county and the year she was born were available online. They were (though I don't know how comprehensive they are since few people were coming up for her birth year) BUT SHE DID NOT COME UP ON THEM.  (If she was born outside a hospital such as at home with a midwife the birth might not have been registered civilly.)

As always, there is a possibility that records were lost, or that we are encountering misspellings in handwritten or errors on database information. Since she was NOT ADOPTED I don't think we're dealing with a new birth certificate being made for her as happens during legal adoptions. (Birth certificates should be called PARENTAGE certificates as after adoption a new number is given and the new parents names are recorded on it.)

I find it odd that she is not on the birth index for the time and place where she was born. I think we should have the Catholic Diocese archive look for her baptism.

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To follow along on this research path, click on the label below that says Research Path Heritage Search 1
This post has been slightly edited for more clarity on August 14, 2019