"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.