Anyone building their family tree has probably run into that one ancestor that refuses to be “found”. I have one – my great-great-grandmother – and the lengths I’ve gone to uncover information about her is sometimes embarrassing. At the very least, it’s certainly been time consuming.
I know from family notes the county in which she was born and she lived there here whole life. I know when she died and have gleaned from census reports an approximate year of birth. However, I can’t find her on census reports until she is already and a range for her birth year. Yet, I cannot find her on a census report before 1892 (a special New York census). By that time, she is married, 29 years old, and living with her first husband.
Without an earlier census I’m left with no information about her parents or any siblings and that’s where my challenge begins. Existing family has no idea who her parents were or even if the last name we have on file was her real surname. Oh, she’s a mystery all right!
I’ve checked newspaper articles for her or her family before this time – nothing. I’ve checked Findagrave – nothing. I requested someone search for her grave but no such luck there, either, so far. I’ve scoured every online resource I can find but nothing gives me any information about her parents or confirms she was in the area around the time between her birth and when she is first married.
I do have her date of death and the record number of her death certificate but it will take months to arrive – if they can find it – and it may not list her parents’ names.
I live on the other side of the country so can’t easily visit any local records offices.
But I am persistent and so I took on the daunting task of tracking every family who had the same name last name as her that was in that county around the time she would have been born. If that family had a daughter, I tracked that daughter from one census report to another until I’d confirmed that she was not my great-great-grandmother.
I figured I’d try the process of elimination to at least find some names I might research further rather than wonder if every girl with the same last name was my relative or not.
Her last name was Bishop – not all that uncommon – so I tracked the events of about 50 girls who had the same last name – regardless of their first name from 1865 through to 1880. Using Excel, I combined families, noted any changes of first name from one report to another, and eventually whittled the list down to six girls on these reports that *might* be my ancestor.
Which – after probably two weeks of work – meant I’d really not found her at all. I guess, what I really learned was which girls were NOT my great-great-grandmother.
Have you ever spent hours, weeks, or months on a genealogy task that yielded no results?