Who ARE they?

Annabelle Cain

Genealogy is all about tracking down relatives, living and dead, though mostly dead. We all know that. But then there are the ones who perch out on the edges of our family tree --  clinging there by reason of a previous marriage, informal adoption, or some other situation. And while they may not be the main focus of our research, they ARE there … sometimes just pleading for recognition.  

A couple of my puzzles were not really on the margins, but did remain elusive for a long time. Franklin Lee Parkison, my grandmother’s cousin, was one of what I call the 
“lost boys,” single, with no fixed address. His widowed mother remarried and it appears they barely kept in touch.  I finally found him through a death certificate which had mispelled his surname.


Another was Albert Kelsey Thompson, also a cousin, also single and also on the move. I THINK I’ve found him, in the potter’s field section of a Sacramento, California, cemetery.


Then there are the youngsters taken in by families, for whatever reason. Often they are given their adopting/fostering family’s surname and their own biological past is virtually erased. While I am not so concerned about delving into that past, I am quite interested in learning what became of them in later life.

Recently I rediscovered a girl named Jessie in our Indiana Cain clan, one of at least three children who had been adopted, informally or otherwise, by Sarah Cain and her husband, Orlando Hamilton. Although obviously quite young in an 1886 family photo, she was identified as the wife of another adoptee in the same family.  Though my proof is not rock-solid, I now feel sure she not only  grew up in the same household as this fellow adoptee, but later did become his second wife. Of course I’ll keep checking for any new evidence that might prove (or disprove) the matter.

But now I’m turning my attention to another young woman, Annabelle, who was found in the 1900 census for Middlesex County, New Jersey, as part of the Albert Cain family. That record states she was an adopted daughter, born January 1886 in England. After that -- nothing.  Family members I queried long ago (all gone now) remember nothing more of her, but I can’t let it go.  Is she the Annabel, also spelled “Anna B.” who is shown as the wife of Jack/John Coffey in subsequent NJ census records? The birth year is close, the birthplace is England, the year of immigration close enough.  This Annabelle is buried in Groveville Cemetery, according to FindaGrave, with a stone that simply shows her years of birth and death.  Without a more specific date I cannot get a death certificate, and searches for obituaries have so far come up empty. No NJ marriage records online -- as far as I can tell, and no children’s birth records which might show the mother’s pre-marriage name.

Well, it is a work in progress. 

Who are you looking for these days?

Copy once, look twice -- or something like that

I have written before about the importance of looking hard at even the most tentative clues in genealogy -- census records that don’t seem worth examining because the dates, birthplaces, or even surnames seem too far removed; references in letters that don’t look pertinent, and on and on. Well, here is another example, from my own research:

I’ve always copied down a lot of items just because they seemed, at the time, to have some connection to my surnames, however slight.  But all too often the notes get consigned to a folder where they lie, forgotten.  In this case, while trying once more to find out what happened to my great-aunt’s son, Franklin Lee Parkison, I was going back through a collection of those set-aside notes. What caught my eye was a pencilled notation I must have made in the days before computers, from the WPA’s “Index to Death Records for Jasper County (Indiana), 1882-1920.” It read: ParkiNson, Frank S., white, male, single, age 56, died 19 July 1919,  Rensselaer, Indiana.  Well, to start with, the surname has an “n” (but Parkison is often misspelled that way), and the middle initial is wrong.  Then, my faulty math led me to dismiss the possibility that this might by my guy. Let’s see, 56 from 1919 means a birth year of 1863. Oh oh. That actually matched what I did know about Frank’s birthdate, as did the likely place of death. (I knew from a letter by his mother that he had been in that area three years earlier.)

As anyone else who searched in Jasper County knows, there hasn’t been much available at the Family History Library (though they seem to have acquired more public records recently). So my searches there have not been fruitful. In a flash of inspiration (why did it take me so long?), I decided to go directly to the source for this WPA index. It was a simple matter to contact the Public Health Department in Rensselaer and learn the procedure for obtaining the death record for this so-called Parkinson individual.

When it arrived, lo and behold, the names of his parents matched, confirming that their “Frank S. Parkinson” was really MY Frank L. Parkison! (Unfortunately the document was a transcription, not a photocopy of the original, so I couldn’t tell how the errors happened.)

This solved, for me, what had been a very long-standing search for the date and place of Frank’s death. (There was another Frank Parkison in the area at the time, which confused matters somewhat.) Now, with a confirmed date of death in hand, I have queried the local library to see of there was a death notice or obituary which give more information.

How many other notes to I have lying around, just waiting for a fresh look and possibly a new interpretation?  What about you?

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On another note:

I recenly mentioned a newspaper article about the smart phone app that Icelanders have, which can confirm the relationship between two possible “kissing cousins,” a necessity in this enclosed and isolated society, where nearly everyone is related to everyone else.  As it happens, I was travelling in Iceland last month (really!), and was able to ask our tour guide about it. She confirmed the program's existence as well as its usefulness "for the young people, of course."  Nice to get it from the source!