Following a Wrong Course

Ancestry.com continues to provide more and more databases and several more indexes. I recently thought I was on the path to find a long lost cousin who disappeared about 1912. The NY state death index listed a Peter F. Goodwin that died in a state institution on Long Island based on the village. I was able to get the 1914 death record for him only to learn that it was a completely different fellow. The names of this gentleman’s parents were found to match his birth record in the index at FamilySearch.org 

As with scientific experiments, family history researchers will often have their hypothesis and working theories challenged and conclusively proved incorrect. Persevere nonetheless and never give up. 

Optical Character Recognition Makes Reading the Newspaper a Dream

Newspapers have always been a vital resource for genealogical research. The challenge for the family historian was to identify times and places to search various newspapers for articles or blurbs about their families.

The technological advancement known as optical character recognition(OCR), has made newspapers a much easier resource to utilize. I was able to find quite a bit on a collateral relative's wife because of her somewhat unusual nickname. 

Once I identified her shopping trip to Chicago in a small local newspaper, I was able to search for all references to her from bits as a teen and young woman to her moving away from the community in 1945 with her new husband.

One interesting 1939 article, including her photo, detailed her nuptials in another state to a previously unknown husband. Later that year she made the social columns for her visit and a year and a half later she ceased being referenced by her married name but resumed being identified by her single moniker.

I found a man that fits her first husband exactly and he did not die until 1994 so I trust that they divorced circa 1941. This is important because while I know that her second marriage was said to have been in a large metro area, I think they may have married in a smaller community. I will have to remember to check for her in the index under both her maiden and married names. 

As her second husband was a Catholic, I do not expect to find a marriage notation next to his baptismal entry. His wife was married(presumably validly) in a Presbyterian ceremony in 1939 so she would have needed an annulment to marry him in the Catholic Church in 1945. My understanding is that those remedies were much harder to come by in that time period. One possible exception would have been if her first husband had been previously wed.

Beware the use of OCR. You will invariably come upon stories where your relatives may not have been the innocent party in a conflict or scandal. Research is not for the faint of heart.