Marguerite Chitwood

The challenge—Find:
1. Ms Chitwood's real name
2. Where she was born
3. Where she died
4. Her marriage date and place
5. Her parents names

What I already know:
1. Her family called her "Lonna". No one knows how it was spelled.
2. In the 1900 census she was listed as Martha., born in Alabama, in May of 1867, married 15 years (1885), mother of 6 children, 5 living. The first four children listed were born in Mississippi. The last one was born in Texas.
3. In the 1910 census she was listed as Marguerite D(?), age 39 (1871)  (married 23 years (1887), mother of 10 children, 8 living. The last four were born in Texas.

What I've done so far:
1. Googled for Martha or Marguerite Chitwood in Alabama. No helpful results. Most Chitwoods were in Kentucky, but some went on to Alabama.

2. Checked out probable Chitwood books at the FHL.

3. Searched for Martha or Marguerite Chitwood on FamilySearch. Found only the 1900 and 1910 census records.

4. Searched Census index in Alabama in 1870 for Martha/Marguerite Chitwood.

5. Searched Census index in Alabama 1880 for Martha/Marguerite Chitwood.

Citations!

It's been about 5 months since I last posted. I have been re-locating (3 times), trying to find gainful employment, and working on getting my Genealogy Accreditation.

For the past week, I have been frustrating myself with trying to write citations for the records I'm collecting. Some are easy, but when I get to the (many) online records, I can't quite figure out what to put where. Since there may be some of you out there who want to cite those online sources, I thought I'd track my trials and tribulations, and hopefully my success (somewhere in the future.)

FamilySearch is doing a great job of trying to keep up with the exploding genealogy market out there. They have put citation suggestions on the  document site and further on a related "research wiki", which is enough for me, but I'm afraid it won't satisfy the Certification Committee.

So the next thing I did was to finally install and start using my RootsMagic5,  which has a built-in citation-maker. Sounds like a snap, huh? Not so. I watched the tutorials and the webinars, which are very elementary and helpful, but when I go to put the actual information into the citation template it just doesn't come out looking like the entries in Evidence Explained, by Elizabeth Shown Mills. She has thought of just about any citation you might come up with, and RootsMagic uses her book as their foundation for the templates. But I can't get the FamilySearch documents to come out right. Maybe I'll have better luck tomorrow.

"Are You My Mother?"

"Are You My Mother?"

Why death certificates are not that good for other kinds of information.

Okay, so I was trying to find my husband's great-grandmother's maiden name. I was  surprised to locate it so easily on the death certificate of one of her children, Hiram Brown

Excitedly I connected all of the children up to William A Brown and Ruth Milburn. I even had them sealed in the temple for time and all eternity. THEN I went looking for her basic information. Where and when had she been born, married, died? Nowhere, never, hadn't. I could not find any person named Ruth Milburn anywhere in the Ohio area, nor any likely Milburn families.

I began to wonder. Could I have been mistaken?







 Eventually I found where a William A. Brown had married a Ruth Beason in Greene Co., Ohio, where William was born and raised. I thought this was probably the real mother of the Brown children, but nothing I could find proved it.









Enter Laura Louisa Brown. 
If she hadn't been born after Ohio had begun keeping birth records I might never have found her name
P.S. I had to start all over with Ruth's temple work. I have since learned to look before I leap.

More from my "Cemetery Series"

One of the easiest things to find  on FamilySearch.org is death records. Of course, I've done most of my research in Ohio, and FamilySearch has indexed a lot of Ohio stuff. Several years ago I wanted to find a baby girl who died in the Youngstown, Ohio area about 1920. I looked at a site online that had an Ohio death records index for specific years. I found one entry that was a "maybe", but it gave so little information that I had to send for the record (and pay the money) to get a copy. It turned out to be the right person, and I was very happy.

BUT! Just a few days ago I typed  that same name into FamilySearch.org and her name came up with a copy of the birth certificate attached. We've come along way, baby, in just 5 years!

  Another name that popped up on FamilySearch after hunting for many years was Laura Louisa Brown, (from the post on Thursday, December 8, 2011: You just have to keep trying. . . fame.) I put her mother's maiden name and father's name in and came up with  Louise Galbreath, which turned out to be the death certificate for Laura Louisa Brown in Nashville, Tennessee. Can you believe it—I was at that moment IN Nashville, staying with my eldest son and daughter-in-law, so hubby and I went right over to the Springhill Cemetery named on the death certificate.

Who would have thought that the very day I discovered where Laura Louisa was buried, I would  be  within shouting distance of the place?

P.S. Springhill is one of the cemeteries that has not yet computerized their records. The lady in the office had to go look in her big book to find where Laura was buried, then write it down on a map of the cemetery and drive us over to the spot. It's a good thing she did, too, because there were no markers on Laura's or her husband's plot. So we just gazed reverently at the grassy spot where (I hope) they were buried.

There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead!

Miracle Max

For one thing, if you're mostly dead you don't show up online. But, if you're all dead there are several places to look for the proof.

I've been pretty surprised at how easy it is to find evidence of death. One good place to start is Histopolis, where they have maps and genealogy links, etc. That might lead you to Find-a-grave, which is a collection of cemetery sites where people have photographed graves and posted them to the Find-a-grave website. Sometimes they post graves they have no relationship to. There are other groups doing similar services for people they don't know. Ohio Gravestones.org is one I've used a lot. Another idea is to look up a specific cemetery and see if they have posted their interments online. An increasing number of them have.  In Cincinnati, Ohio, I was researching the Binder family. If  you go to the link and type Binder into the Last Name field, you'll see all of the Binders buried at Walnut Hills Cemetery.

There are more places to find death info.   Wait 'til I get going!

You just have to keep trying. . .

Even when the index says the name isn't there, it often pays to go through the film or book page by page to see for yourself.

Trying to find the connecting link for one of my families, I pinned my hopes on the youngest child—Laura Louisa Brown—the only one born after they began keeping birth records  in Ohio. These records usually list the father's name and the mother's maiden name (a great way to find the mother's family.)

I was living in San Diego at the time, so I sent to the Salt Lake Library for the Greene County, Ohio 1870 birth records. I waited impatiently for the two weeks or so until the film came, rushed down to the FHC, put it on the machine and went directly to the Index at the beginning. There were several Brown names, but no Laura Louisa. Dis-ap-point-ment!!! But you can't wait all that time and then just give up, so I wrote down the page numbers of all of the Browns listed—just in case. I even went through them very slowly so it would take longer. Nothing. I sat there thinking about what to do next, and as I thought, I flipped the microfilm reader handle (in frustration), and then happened to look up at the screen and. . .ta da... there she was!!!

I couldn't believe it.  That was my connecting link!

Serendipity. I went back to the Index to see why I hadn't found Laura there. I looked at the page number and saw that the names for several entries had been obliterated by spilled water or something.

 There was nothing there. Seeing that I was not as thorough back then as I am now, I might or might not have gone through every page carefully from the beginning. I might still be wondering who that mother was.

Another day I'll tell you why it was so important I find Ruth's name.

Tombstone rubbings aren't that easy.

My hubby and I were browsing in an old cemetery in Greene County, Ohio, one day when I came upon an old tombstone that was near some of our family stones. This one was so weathered I couldn't read it very well. "No problem." I said. "I'll just make a rubbing of it and it will appear before my eyes." Right! First off, I hadn't prepared ahead of time, not realizing this situation might come up. So I didn't have the few tools necessary to do the job. —like tissue paper or pellon, black crayon or "rubbing wax", soft brush to clean off the tombstone face, and masking tape to hold the paper still while you rub.

This is what I came up with.  I'm glad I wrote the few words I could read off the stone. I will never know who Mary was the wife of though.

Somehow it seemed a lot easier back when I was a kid sitting in church making rubbings of the organ on the front of the hymnal.