"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.

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.