CONFUSING LISTING OF GREAT-GREAT GRANDMA'S SURNAME(S) : QUESTIONS FROM READERS of ANCESTRY WORSHIP - GENEALOGY

Readers please note that I've changed the names given by this reader due to a need for privacy.

Q: I'm looking at some information on the Internet that was added to a genealogy database by someone else, someone I don't know. This concerns my great-great grandmother in Arkansas. My great-great grandmother is listed as Mary Johnson, Formerly Marie Smith. Someone else posted Mary Johnson was Formerly Marie Walker. What does this mean?

Thanks,

Alice

A: Hello Alice. 

I find the way that information was posted as a bit strange - and confusing - as if the postings came from stories or rumors rather than genealogy research. "Formerly" could mean this was a previous surname or previous married name. And as you found the same woman also listed by someone else as "Formerly" with yet another surname, it could be that your great-great grandmother was married twice. Also this could indicate an informal or formal name change. Or an adoption.

Let's go over this:

First, we cannot believe everything that is posted on the Internet or on databases that offer individuals to post their research (or family stories or rumors), especially when no documents are attached, especially because I see these errors uploaded to multiple genealogy sites.

Secondly, the history of name changes in Arkansas is that informal (common law) name changes were recognized for some time, even when the process of legal (court ordered) name changes was introduced in 1851. In other words, she could have changed her name because she wanted to, without being married, widowed, or divorced, and without a legal proceeding.

So, I would suggest that you try to get a birth certificate or church record of her birth/baptism and see what it says. I would also suggest you try to get a death certificate or cemetery/funeral home document. And of course, any evidence of her marriage or marriages through marriage certificates. I trust you have traced her back as far as you can go with census records as well. 

1830 is the first Federal Census for that state and you can also check the State Census' which were done in 1823,1829.1865, and 1911.

There are better ways to indicate that a woman is being listed by her maiden name.

Instead of the word "formerly"

Marie "Mary" Johnson née Marie Smith

Marie "Mary" Johnson born Marie Smith

Marie "Mary" Smith - Johnson

Marie "Mary" Smith, wife of Jed Johnson

Mrs. Marie "Mary" Johnson, born Marie Walker

Ask yourself, which of these forms is least confusing and most informative!

Keep Researching!

Christine

C 2026 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy All Rights Reserved

THE DUST BOWL by KEN BURNS - ONE OF THE BEST DOCUMENTARIES AMERICAN GENEALOGISTS COULD WATCH

Did you know that when the Dust Bowl refugees (called "Exo-Dusters")  came to California on Route 66 citizens tried to stop them from entering the state at the borders ,not wanting these people to have any public support?  THE 1930's  MIGRATION OF THE DUST BOWL PEOPLE  DWARFS THAT OF THE MIGRATION OF THE COVERED WAGON ERA!  This was also one of the worst ecological disasters to happen in the 20th century.

This and many other facts that were brought forth make THE DUST BOWL by Ken Burns a film that should intrigue anyone working on American genealogy. The film has a multitude of black and white images of the people, the farmsteads, and the black clouds of dust that devastated farming and caused many to die of dust fever, a lung disease, including many children, and left many with life-long lung ailments.  This wasn't a little dust.  This was a chronic barrage of massive clouds that even left the equivalent of sand dunes of dusk and is a testimonial to ecological disaster that was man made but also man resolved after much suffering.  The film also has testimonials by some of the children who experienced migration who are now past mid-life.

Among the facts covered that are compelling to me and other American researchers are the following:

The clouds of dust were so fast and dark that some people thought the Biblical end of the world was upon them.  The dust blackened the skies and chocked them and gave them dust pneumonia. The dust caused static electricity that made using phones impossible.  The Buffalo grass that they had replaced with wheat is what nature and time had evolved as the perfect ground cover for a sometimes wet and sometimes parched area of the country there near Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle.  Eventually 40,000 farmers signed up to learn a new technique called contour farming which over several years time did resolve the issue, but through the 1930's 80% of the Great Plain soil was eroded.  As a result of the Dust, COUNTIES LOST 30-40% of their population in the 1930's. Schools closed.  (See the changes by looking at the 1930 and then 1940 census.*)  But 75% of the population hung in there maybe because they had families in the local cemeteries.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took a train ride, covering a couple thousand miles, in order to see for himself and talk to the farmers.  Now that we know that Roosevelt hid his crippled body, when we see film of him standing, with an aid next to him, arm provided support, and then raising his arm to wave, we know what an actor he was.   He saw that millions of acres were abandoned and that the children were underweight.

Many Dust Bowl families were too proud to accept what public relief there was.  HERE THEN COMES THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS...  Young men made $30 a month and had to send $25 of it to their families.  Some people were critical, feeling that they were being paid to stand around, but others saw that over time these young men learned skills and used their hard physical labor to improve the country.  (I can tell you that there is a park nearby where I live where the walls and steps that CCC's members built are still in use and in great shape.)  And here then comes THE WORKS PROJECT ADMINISTRATION.
THE WPA BECAME THE BIGGEST EMPLOYER IN THE NATIONS with 8 million people employed and saving themselves from starvation.

By 1937 other ecological disasters were happening.  The 1937 OHIO RIVER FLOOD that effected the city of Pittsburgh with houses floating away


THE DUST BOWL a film by Ken Burns is a production of Florentine Films and WETA Television   C 2012  The Dust Bowl Film Project, LLC

Review C 2014 Ancestry Worship Genealogy

WOODY GUTHRIE WAS MOVED TO LOS ANGELES BECAUSE OF THE DUST BOWL and is probably the most famous DUST BOWL migrant.