Family

Today, I had the opportunity of working on my family history. I had sent an email last night to a cousin in Vancouver asking about some information that he might have. Well, Jim answered the email and sent me information as well as an obituary about the person that I was asking about.

I sorted through the information and was able to make sense of most of it. After I had entered it into my tree, some more information came to the surface. I use websites that have an automatic search function. This function does about 80% of the work when the information is on their website. This function can only sort through the information and records that the website has available. Not all information that is needed is on websites or is not yet digitized. It costs money to digitize records, but, fortunately, there are people that do the work needed.

Anyway, there was a bit of the information that he sent that did not fit easily into place. As it turned out, this information was on the tree of another cousin. This cousin lives in Rainy River, and we have been in touch previously. It just didn’t sink in which part of the tree was the one that she belonged to. I found out today.

We have just spent about an hour and a half, getting to know each other. I also took the time to sort out those hard-to-fit pieces of the puzzle and can now put it to bed (so to speak). I also asked for more information concerning the family and she was quite happy to give me the information. I found out that she is about a year and a half older than me and that her brother is about three quarters of a year older than me as well.

We plan to stay in touch as we are family, albeit distant family. My husband has been told that if we were to travel west in Canada, we will be stopping to visit.

I have found that when you research your family history, you have a marvelous opportunity to meet family members that have drifted away. This drift is not always intended and, sometimes, you think that there are not many members of the family.

Family history will help you to discover your living family as well as those who have gone on before you. It helps you to rebuild the ties that should never have been severed. It can make your family stronger. Once you discover how large your family actually is, and you may never know the full extent of the family, it’s up to you what you do with the information. It can be a very joyous trip.

On the other hand, you might dig up some information that some members of the family do not appreciate. Just remember, your ancestors were people too. They made their mistakes just as we make our mistakes. Life can be very rewarding even with the mistakes that are made. After enough time, we should be able to look back and say, “Yes, I made a mistake, and it was a bad one. But I learned from it.” Or “Yes, I made a mistake, and I thought that it was a bad one, but I survived and am trying to do better.”

Live life. Love your family. Look for the missing members of the family that should be there. Work together. Have fun. Support one another. If you don’t have your family, you don’t have one of the most important things in life.

Finding the Missing Children

Today's post is another article that I wrote in March of 2013. I find it curious because I have just found one of the missing children today. He was born on 12 November 1928 and died on 25 November of the same year. The cause of death was listed as "infectious intoxication". I'm not too sure what that meant. This little boy only lived a week. I am of mixed feelings about this being a mother myself. The parents did not get the opportunity of learning much about this son of theirs. They did not get to help him learn how to walk, talk, and all the other things that children do. However, it is my belief that the parents will have the opportunity to raise their child after the return of Christ to this world. I make mention about 3 little girls who did live longer than this boy did. They are related through their uncle, my great-grandfather. This little boy is loosely related through their uncle, my grandmother's husband. I say loosely because my grandmother's husband was not my grandfather.

As a family historian, sometimes you will see something that others don’t see.  That little scrap of paper that may have some information on that is needed to piece together an event of an ancestor or that toy that Granddad or Uncle Jack used to play with.  Sometimes, I see the birth of a child and I think about the joy that the child will bring to his or her parents.  Sometimes, that joy is short-lived because of an illness, an accident, or a medical condition that is not treatable.  Fortunately, the first and last events don’t happen as often as they used to, thanks to the advancement of medical knowledge and technology.

However, they did happen quite often in the past.  There is not one family today that did not have these things happen to their ancestors.  Some families lost only one child, whereas other families lost almost all of their children due to the lack of medical knowledge.  Many of these children lived lives of between 1 day and 9 years and were born and died between census-taking years.

These are the children that need the most work on our part because we have to really look for them.  You will not find their names on census records.  The online programs that we use, such as Ancestry, are not very good at finding children that we don’t know about.  We have to put the effort into finding these children as they want to be found just as much as our ancestors that are easier to find.  We have to think outside the box when dealing with situations like this. 

I look at the birth rate of children in a family and, if there are large gaps where there should have been a child, I start asking why.  My great-grandfather’s sister, Jane Fielder, had a child out of wedlock that lived during a census year.  I began to get impressions that Jane may have had more children than her daughter, especially as she was a domestic servant.  I got the impression that I needed to check the workhouse records and followed through with it.  I found Agnes, Catherine, Cornelia, and Ellen.  Agnes was born in 1882 and died in 1883.  Catherine was born in 1885 and died in 1887.  Cornelia was born in 1888 and died in 1889.  Ellen was born in 1892 and died in 1893.  I have a feeling that there may be more as Jane’s daughter, Jane (the child that lived), was born in 1872 and I need to look at the workhouse records for the time before Jane was born and the time from Jane to Agnes. 

These lost children need to be found.  If we put the effort into finding these children, we will experience great happiness and satisfaction that we are indeed doing our family history correctly.