Genealogy, inspired!
Today marks the date in 1882 that Dr. Robert Koch announced his discovery of the bacteria that causes Tuberculosis, also known as TB or (for us family historians) Consumption. To commemorate World Tuberculosis Day, I’d thought I’d share a personal story about TB. A story about how it brought my maternal Grandma from her hometown…
Last Spring I reached out to the Marion (Indiana) Public Library about some research I was doing about two young siblings, Leah and Dale, who passed away tragically in separate incidences. I was trying to untangle the threads of oral history from fact and thought there might be a newspaper article or two about the…
Inaccuracies are caused by faulty recall; there is no factual research to discover heights of buildings, dates of demolition, blood types
Thanks to my maternal Grandma’s writing, I know that Nancy was a Quaker and very much a “woman of her time”. She was expected to do things a certain way and expected the same of her 13 children. Which is why, when Hannah came along and didn’t exactly fall in line, she began telling her how “bold and queer” she was.
One thing that comes up time and again when researching how to document one’s family history are the legal documents that can and should be used to confirm an ancestors identity and their relationships to others. These documents include vital records (birth, death, adoption, and marriage certificates), probate records/Wills, newspaper notices/Obituaries, and Census records, much of which can be found or ordered online if not held within your personal family records.
But what if you don’t have access to such records? Or what if they simply don’t exist?
This is the conundrum I’ve found myself in with multiple passed loved ones spanning three generations on my mom’s side. And so, as I’ve asked myself how to document the undocumented, I thought, “I surely can’t be alone, can I?”!