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....
C 2019 Ancestry Worship Genealogy Blogspot
To follow along on this genealogy research path click on the label below that says Research Path Heritage Search 1
