Family History Find of the Day

A few days ago I had one of those lightning bolt moments: "look right here!" something said. And so I looked. As a result, I was able to unravel at least part of the mystery of the origins of an ancestor's adopted/foster daughter. It started with an obituary for Plumer Morton Woodworth, my great grandfather FJ Bird's first cousin. I hadn't seen that particular newspaper article before, even though I've done a fair amount of research on this family. (Chalk this find up to the exponential increase in digitized, indexed resources - particularly newspapers.) The obituary said he was survived by his (second) wife Marie, his sister Hattie Lockwood, and a foster daughter, Mrs. George Bustard of Honolulu. Two other published obituaries made no mention of Francis... The Honolulu Advertiser (Honolulu, Hawaii) · 20 Feb 1916, Sun · Page 17. Newspapers.com. In 1900, an adopted daughter "Rollen Woodworth" appears in the Federal Census in the household o

This is the story of a death notice about a person who wasn't actually dead and how Delia Miner Cobb Bird Hooker used it to help her qualify for a Civil War widow's pension. The first time I ran across the 1866 death notice for Byron Bird in a California newspaper, I assumed there must have been two men by the same name living in California at that time, or that the notice might have had something to do with Bryon's wife, Delia. (Spoiler alert: it did have something to with Delia, but not in the way I imagined.) When I first read the notice, I already had ample evidence that "my" Byron Bird lived well beyond 1866. (The 1900 US Census , for example.) At the same time, I could find no record of Byron's wife Delia after the mid-1860s. It thought it was possible that the newspaper was announcing the death of Mrs . Byron B. Bird. Several pieces of evidence seemed to point to that conclusion: Byron is shown as a widower in the 1900 census. Delia was born in