Spent My Weekend With The Johnsons

In my previous post, Word of the Day: Avoidance, I lamented that I have never really made progress with my Johnson family. I found a new to me resource that gave me the push I needed to go ahead and see what I could find.

NYS Historic Newspapers

I am loving the efforts of libraries and archives to make their collections more accessible. They are already fighting such a battle daily for funding and support, so anything that ends up being online, and free (!!) is an amazing accomplishment. I sent a donation by the way, because this site is truly amazing.

The NYS Historic Newspapers website is honestly really amazing. You can choose by county and then it will show you all newspapers they have and what years they have. My interest is Suffolk County for the Johnson family. I really want to know what was going on in Babylon, New York. My luck was on my side as they had South Side Signal which was a paper in Babylon from 1869 through at least 1920. 1920 being the last year they have issues online for.

Once you choose the paper you want to look at, you can then search the entire paper for something, which I believe is OCR searches. (I might be wrong, wouldn’t be the first time. 😅) When you go into month, you can also just search the month. Unfortunately for me, there was an advertisement for a Dr. Clark Johnson’s medicine. So my search results are a mess, I probably should learn the tricks on how to exclude those. If possible anyway.

Using the one trick I do know, I searched for Arthur, just to see if I could narrow down my results and I did! I want the 1880s so that left me with one result. Well, better than zero. Maybe the 1890s will be helpful too.

This is my one result from the 1880s, which is announcing Arthur’s death. I’m not sure who the Arthur Johnson is in the 1917 articles, but I will have to keep it in my pending folder for another day. Right now, I’m trying to focus on Arthur and his family. Always in the back of my mind, I have the one clipping on Newspapers.com as well.

This is a few years before his own death so this made me naturally curious to see if the South Side Signal would have mention of the deaths or even obituaries. There were 135 results for Johnson on my search results and the majority of those were for Dr. Clark Johnson. 😐 Never fear, I have Spotify and a healthy patience for paging through newspapers. I will side note here…

Side note: I understand that I need to look at each page of the paper, and see if there are other mentions. However, this paper has a section for birth, marriages and deaths reported in the town. In fact, they put instructions for it on the front page of the paper regularly for a very long time. I made a decision for this task, I was just going to check the one section for anything for my Johnson family to at least establish a clearer timeline for events. Some issues of the paper are very hard to read and faded, so it was really an eye strain issue in the end, but also I hope it was a practical one and not just lazy on my part.

There is a state wide death index for New York that spans 1880-1956. I decided to use FamilySearch to narrow some Johnson results by Babylon in the 1880s. Again, I’m just trying to narrow things down here. The plan was to hit the results of the index search and then go through the time frame needed page by page. I could be doing this the hard way or the wrong way but it’s definitely my way. 😂

My Results

I worked first from this index, then I’ve paged issue by issue from the papers first issue. Which was July 7, 1869. I’m up to 1885 now. 😂 Still going as I write. Of course all this is not written in permanent marker, but now I have certificates I can order, which will take me awhile, because New York State is currently backlogged by 4 years. 😅

This is where I currently stand with the Johnson now. Some of the announcements did specify some of the children as child of Arthur and Ann Johnson. Others did not. Mary’s a little trickier. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, probably I did. She disappears from her husband’s household after the 1910 census. In 1915 and 1920 the children are at the same address (838 Hendrix Street, Brooklyn) as before with their father. In 1920, her husband Robert Moore is even still listed as married. However, his 1925 death certificate, with his oldest child as informant, lists him as a widower. Then the 1926 Caldwell, New Jersey city directory, listing Robert’s death also shows a Mrs. Robert Moore living at the household. This is almost a decade before Robert Jr. will be married and he lists that 1933 marriage as his first. Then in the Moore family plot records for Evergreen cemetery it lists Mary Moore as being buried in Brooklyn on September 7, 1945. This is 20 years after Robert Sr.’s death.

So just color me confused. 😂 I’ve ordered the death certificate for a Mary Moore who is the right age, died September 4, 1945 in Marcy, New York. This happens to be the same location as a State Hospital. Is it a shot in the dark? Yes. Did I send the request 2 years ago? Yes. Am I still waiting? Also yes. Like I said New York State has a backlog. I’m about halfway through my wait allegedly, but at this point, I’m hesitant to send anymore requests. Its really a crazy thought process. I’m hesitant to send when I don’t even know if I’ll receive the first request, but I also feel the need to get the long wait started. For now I’ll sit and ponder it some more.

Anyway. Long story even longer. This was my weekend spent with the Johnsons. 😂