The man I'm working with told me that his birth mother had been placed in the Catholic Orphanage because her mother had "died in childbirth or soon after." This would mean that her mother's death date and her birth date should be close.
Back in the day such a child had a chance of being raised by relatives, especially if there was a large family in the area - almost a clan as this one was, by paid governess or care giver as many women took children in for very little money, a kind of informal day care, and sometimes a man would remarry quickly to have a mother for his children and take a motherless child back from the orphanage.
Why had none of these things happened when it's clear that the birth family and their blood relatives were numerous and close by? Is it true that a father visited her until he died?
One possibility is that this huge extended family all had so many children of their own to afford and care for. Or they considered her parents to be the black sheep of the family (rightfully or not.)
I ran a little research on the present-day members of this family as well as members of this family that were considered famous within their small community in the past 100 years and they are doing well. They had farmsteads early and those who had never been to school afforded their children college educations... It's the old story of early land ownership leading to profits of selling it so a suburb can be developed.
I went back to that birth and death index available online for the county and state and searched for all women of the birth mother's maiden surname who had died the same year or so that she had been born. I found ONE.
I found THAT family on the census. This potential birth parents couple are not the "Bob and Mary So and So" that appear on the FIND A GRAVE information. In this family there were two sons who were older. This works with the story that after the father died the two sons were not interested in helping their sister. But there's a problem in that the man of the house died the year before his wife - a possible birth mother candidate - died. He thus could not be a father who visited her until he died. He still could have begot and then died. I need to find the exact dates of his birth and death as he does come up on FINDAGRAVE but there are no details on his tombstone which is not in the family graveyard of the other persons with that surname but in the graveyard of his wife's family.
He also does not come up on that state's death indexes!
This could mean he died elsewhere.
But sending for his burial record or a diocese record of his death/funeral may help.
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
