If you don’t hear from me for a few days, it’s because FamilySearch just added a ton of new records to their website. I can’t wait to dig in and start looking. I have 227 matches for Taylor in Somerset County, Maryland alone! Not to mention the Kentucky Death and Marriage Records they added. I was so excited I had to post a second entry today!
There is always one person in your family file who frustrates you. Sometimes it’s because they show up out of nowhere. Or maybe they disappeared. How these mysteries are ever solved I don’t know. I usually just walk away from it for awhile and try again later with a clear brain. Sometimes it works, most times I have to lather, rinse, and repeat a few times.
One of those people in my family is Mr. Henry C Mays. He showed up in the household of John and Celia Mays in 1900. He’s listed as their son. When my Mom was researching this family, she was always suspicious about him. She thought maybe he was actually Nancy’s son but her parents were raising him. Who knows what the real story is. There isn’t much to verify that available to me right now. Especially since Henry was born in or around 1885. Well before Kentucky started regulating birth records in 1911.
Henry is still there in 1910, still listed as John and Celia’s son. So I’m going to go for broke and assume that he is their son. The problem is that I can’t seem to find a death record for him to verify this. There is a Henry Mays living in Rowan County, Kentucky in 1920 but I can’t be sure that is him and the family is gone again in 1930. 1920 is when John, Celia, and William Harmon moved to Ohio. Nancy married and stayed in Kentucky though. So Henry could have ended up anywhere. Eventually I hope to find him. I’ll keep trying until I find out where he went.
The even crazier part is we asked my Grandmother about William Harmon Mays’ family before she passed away. No one was even aware that William had a sister, let alone another brother somewhere. Who knows what we could have found out if my mother’s father had lived longer, but we may never know what happened to the Mays family. They seemed to have scattered and not spoken of each other.
The beauty of starting your family file over is that you know everything in there will be correct. The dilemma I have is I would never delete my old file. It’s been the file I’ve edited for many years now. I could never throw it away like a used shopping bag. (Actually I use the reusable bags now so that was a bad metaphor.) The problem I’ve come across is how much of my old file and the original (not entirely trustworthy) family tree to use.
It’s easy to say I’ll just use it as a guideline and I’ll back it up with documents as I go. Sure that’s the obvious choice. What about that first time I come across something that isn’t documented though? Kentucky was pretty sporadic in their death records before 1911. So what do I do about all those infant children that passed away in the Taylor family? I can’t immediately back them up, but surely they existed. I can look up cemetery records, and newspapers when I’m in Kentucky but what about now? If I just say I’ll go back to it later, that’s the old me talking. I always say I’ll do it later, and then I forget and never go back. My family file will never be restored that way.
So my solution for now is to source it as the Undocumented Family Tree, and make myself a list of records I need to find. This list is a start, but that could become quite crowded quickly. So maybe an Excel file will be my better option. One for the documents I need, and one to keep track of cemeteries I need to visit.
This may seem like rambling to you, but if I don’t hash this out now, I’ll never come to a decision…
Oh, and for those that remember or read this blog post I made? Yeah I’m going to be making a private family tree on Ancestry.com for each of the lines, just like my website. I won’t be doing it right away though. Most likely when I hit the inevitable brick wall.
We’ve had the pleasure of entertaining my cousin and her two energetic little girls this week. They left this morning and the house is eerily silent. I’ve done laundry (not finished), I played with the pictures in Photo Shop. I finally finished that book I was reading. Now I’m going to catch up on here! Sorry for the little absence but I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Yesterday, we took the girls on a day trip to Washington, DC. It’s about 2 hours from our house and yesterday was a very pretty day. We didn’t get to tour the museums. That sounds bad but we ended up walking a total of 5 miles yesterday, so I don’t know where we would have fit museums in! The youngest, she wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial really bad because he’s her favorite coin. Everyone else just enjoyed seeing the sites.
Continue reading “The Things I Saw”I’ll try and put together an informative post about Point Lookout / Fort Lincoln once I have some more free time. We visited today and it has a big spot in history. Tomorrow we’re headed up to Washington D.C. for some culture. 😉 So I’ll be taking some more pictures of that.
We have company this week. My cousin is in Maryland visiting us. I may not have the time to get updates in this week, but we’ll see! I have nothing to offer in way of tips or tricks today, so I’ll leave you with a picture!
Emogene Taylor-Mays-Utter (1929-2005)
She was one of my favorite people in the whole world and I still miss her. See you soon folks!
I never thought I’d have anything to contribute to Madness Monday at GeneaBloggers. Sure I have plenty of dementia in the family but I doubted I’d ever have any good stories about this subject. A while back (meaning I can’t remember when), I got the death certificate for my Great-Great Grandfather. I got quite a surprise when looking at his cause of death.
For many many years (okay for 4 years), I have been trying to locate where the New Zion Cemetery in Pendleton County, Kentucky is located. I found the New Zion Cemetery listed on James William Applegate’s death certificate. He is the second generation of Applegates and his father died fairly young, so information from that time is hard to find. So having a cemetery to go to and look around might solve some things for me. Maybe he’s in a family plot? I don’t know until I find it.
Unfortunately for me, all mentions of this cemetery are vague at best. My Google-fu obviously needs polishing. However, I was adding in James’ source information on my website last night and I was re-checking some websites. I got the most pleasant surprise!
In honor of Earth Day, I’m going to show you a little glimpse into what we worked on recently. Our first vegetable garden. It’s our first try, and we’re still noobies when it comes to things like this, but we’re trying. That’s all that really matters right?
After I made my Mays Family post yesterday, I went back through the Kentucky Death Records on Ancestry.com. I decided to just put random details in there and see what came up. You may not be able to tell from the size of that death certificate but that is Jurena Mays’ death certificate. It shows her married name as Adkins. So that was a nice little hint. It also showed her parents as William Mays and Anna Click. That answered the questions about whose family she belonged to, but not my questions about why she showed up out of the blue in 1870.
Having the tip of the married name of Adkins, and the Informant name of Milburn Adkins, I set about finding Census records for Jurena. What happens next is why I took a two day break from the Mays family. I just couldn’t take it anymore.
1900 was the first census I tried to find. I couldn’t find Jurena anywhere. I tried all the combinations I could, but I couldn’t find her. So I jumped to Milburn Adkins. In all the remaining census years Milburn has a wife whose name varies. The birthday never various. The birthday matches up with Ellen Mays, but her name is mostly listed as Eliza, except for one year when she was known as Eliza Ellen. So my immediate next thought was that this must be Ellen’s husband and he acted as informant for his sister-in-law. Only when I started relaying this information to my Mom. She broke out her old notes, she had a complete different husband for Ellen.
It’s about that moment, I threw my hands in the air. Put on my fluffy pajamas, and grabbed myself a cold drink. I was done. So now I’m going to take a break from the Mays family and focus for a bit on the Taylor side. They are so much easier to locate!