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....


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

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

I offered to help an adopted person who, in the 1990's, went through two years of living hell to get his original birth certificate. He has memories of being in a Catholic orphanage. It wasn't all bad but then he got out of there before the age of five. He was there for about a year and a half. He was not abused. He got parents who were devout Catholics and is to this day himself devout.  They were good and loving people.

After he located his birth mother, who was still alive, he contacted her and went to visit her. She recognized him instantly and also told him that she had prayed every night of her life for a reunion. From then on she was included in his family, got to know her grandchildren, and even the parents who adopted him accepted her as a member of their family.

He never contacted his birth father. 

His birth mother had herself been in a Catholic orphanage in another state. Her emancipation from the orphanage was like what happens today with many foster children who age out of the system; 18 and nowhere to go.  Today these 18-year-old emancipated foster children find themselves struggling to support themselves in an increasingly expensive world. It's not uncommon for them to become homeless. After turning 18 and being let go by the orphanage she had been in, this gentleman's mother took the train to another city where another of the orphans, who had left a couple years earlier, offered to take her in.  

World War II was brewing.

Having the real names of both his birth parents, I encountered a glowing obituary for his father. Perhaps the man who deserted his mother wasn't all bad, but I had to wonder if the woman he did marry and the many children he had with her ever heard they had a half-brother out there somewhere. 

One of those children apparently pridefully did a big family history on FAMILYSEARCH.  I could easily email him through their system but would not do that behind this man's back.  I promised him that I would not post anything on databases or Internet about our search for more information about his family's origins, especially not identifying information. Nor will I contact them. This is the confidentiality that I can personally promise. I can't guarantee that no one else is working on the same question or family.

I'm going to post on how I'm approaching this. Maybe some of you will want to follow along. To link to the posts on this particular research path, click on the label below that says Research Path Heritage Search 1.

It's his birth mother's side I'm working on and since the orphanage she was in was the intake for Catholic children in a certain mid-west city and the surname is prevalent there, it's first a matter of looking at all the families with that name on census and seeing where she would fit or not in birth order. And also doing that for him. 

His birth mother said that her mother died giving birth to her and there were several older brothers. That her father had visited her every weekend until he died. Then her brothers shunned her. So of course, I want to find a birth certificate for her mother that fits the story.

But ah... One sometimes uncovers lies when doing genealogy and family history research.

Let's all say a little prayer for this situation, this person.  Unlike some persons who were adopted, he is not striving to become part of a family that did not want his birth mother.  Simply he and his wife want to travel to the towns in Europe that his immigrant ancestors left and enjoy that heritage. At least that's the start of it.

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

Note: This post was slightly edited for clarity on August 14, 2019

FORENSIC GENEALOGY?

Forensic Genealogy is the use of genealogy in order to locate missing people and solve crimes, a juicy subject.

I recently attended a lecture by a well regarded and experienced Forensic Genealogist. She told about doing numerous family charts in order to locate someone who might know where a woman who had gone missing might be.  This was not exactly a teenage runaway situation.  There had been a remarriage, a step-parent, and the person intentionally cut off from everyone.  That's difficult to do.  Maybe her reasons wouldn't seem rational to you or me, but the Forensic Genealogist sought to give her family "closure." And they got it.  She had lived for many years but had commit suicide.  She had done what many people do when they want to get lost.  She had assumed the identity of a person who had died who was about her age. Other than assume this identity, and gather together the paperwork she would need to prove who she was and keep her cover, she was never involved in any other "criminal" activity.  I looked at some web sites that tied to the Forensic Genealogist's and some of them started out using the word "Criminal" because of "Identity Theft" on this person who needed to get lost as she saw it, and I sort of cringed. 

While listening to the lecture I thought about Missing Persons.

Tell me, if YOU hated your family, maybe had a terrible childhood, and you wanted to get lost, if you never wanted to hear from them again, what would you do?  Expect the FBI or CIA to create a new ID for you?  Law enforcement does those things for people in Witness Protection Programs sometimes. Tombstone websites would certainly make locating someone your age who died more accessible to you, easier than prowling cemeteries in other towns by yourself!

It turned out that yes, there was ONE person, a distant family member, who had contact with her and kept her secret for many years. That he kept her secret makes me think that she had some good reasons to leave and be in hiding.  My guess, the stepfather molested her.


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THE LIMITATIONS OF TOMBSTONE PROJECTS - THERE ARE BURIALS THAT HAVE NO TOMBSTONES

I have very mixed feelings about tombstone projects. 

Volunteers go through cemeteries, take the information down off the tombstone - sometimes photographing - and put it on the information up on the world wide web - the Internet for anyone who uses the net to access. 

To me this can be culturally insensitive and as I see it, no graveyard that allows it is sacred.  Some cultures do not allow picture taking of the living, believing that this takes some of a person's essence or soul and some see tombstones as ancestral and even where the soul rests.  THE TOMBSTONE CENSUS TAKERS SEEM TO EASILY GAIN PERMISSION or DO NOT CARE about these things.  It makes me question what paying for a sacred space or privacy in death is all about.

The tombstone project volunteers put information up that is less than 70 years old and the US government thinks of 70 years as the privacy zone - thus the 1940 census was just revealed and records in many states are sealed for the same reason - privacy.

Some people have tombstones that have been carved with the name of the spouse who isn't dead yet. This communicates information such as the name of the living person and that they have been widowed.  Not private.  In some places, not safe at all.

I can't even get into all the ways the information can be used by identity thieves.

MAYBE THE WORST THING ABOUT TOMBSTONE PROJECTS is that they give the FALSE IMPRESSION that the burials with tombstones are all the burials in that cemetery.  YOU SHOULD STILL CONTACT CEMETERIES IF YOU ARE TRYING TO FIND RELATIVES, and the Death Record of that person should record if they were buried and where, or if they were cremated.  So don't use tombstone information without the death record for your genealogy.

As funerals and cemeteries and tombstones are more expensive, I suspect more people will be going with cremation in the future, unless their religion forbids it.

Please be aware that some cemeteries have no tombstones, or at least many that have been eroded or stolen.  There is no national law that says you have to buy one. Many cemeteries have about 2/3rds of their burials unmarked.  This can be because no one ever bought a tombstone or because more than one person is in the tomb.  Check the rules and regulations for the city, county, or state about this, but in some places a purchased tomb site allows two burials, one atop the other.  (In goes the destitute child or the ex wife!)

Also check into the religious beliefs about burials which may differ because a person is Muslim or Jewish, as examples.

I HAVE FOUND A NUMBER OF TOMBSTONES THAT WERE CARVED WITH INCORRECT INFORMATION, including misspellings of names, variations of the name the person was born with being very common.  This can give you the impression you have not found the person you're looking for. 

Finally, the birth date may not be accurate.  In some times and places the date on the tombstone is the date the person was BAPTISED, and the death date, the date they received LAST RITES.  Really!

FALL is a TIME OF HARVEST, REST, REMEMBRANCE, and ANCESTOR WORSHIP

At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, the Fall equinox has recently passed, the Harvest Festivals are in high gear, and Thanksgiving in the United States - celebrating plenty and prosperity - is not far away.

Until recently, until the Industrial and then Technological Revolution, our ancestors lived around AGRICULTURE, and fall was a time of rest before the harshness of snowy and sometimes bitter winters.

It is during this season that the remembrance of our ancestors, be it through the Mexican DAY OF THE DEAD festivities (all those sugary funny skeletons going through the paces of daily life in the afterlife!) or ALL SOULS DAY (throughout Christendom).

Today I try to imagine what life so close to the earth and the weather and so dependent on local crops must have been. Today we live lives extended through better nutrition (vitamins!) and medicine, but in the past, at this time of year many people must have wondered if they would live through the winter to see the spring flowers bloom.

Today we are sheltered from death in many ways. We expect to live a long time and plan accordingly. When someone dies it is not so often at home but in a hospital, where professionals come to take the body away; it used to be the relatives did so and laid the person out at home.

This is a good time to collect the memories of our living relatives and to ask their cooperation in our genealogy and family history projects. You may want to record the stories of funerals - the wakes, walk around cemeteries recording information from tombstones, or simply light a candle to those ancestors who help you in your research!