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 ...

This week I was finally able to confidently identify John Ralph , the brother of my ancestor Edward Martin Ralph . Family records indicated that Edward and John had immigrated together to the United States from Cornwall. But I have never been able to find any evidence of John living near his brother. So where was he? I recently used the FamilySearch messaging feature to contact someone who had made an edit to an ancestor's profile. I couldn't figure out the connection and wanted to know how we might be related. Happily, he responded quickly, and in his reply, he made reference to an old letter he had been given that provided details about both the Howe and Ralph families (our shared ancestors).  The undated letter from "Aunt Ella" Sedgwick Ralph (my g-g-grandmother) to her nephew William Withey provided many important Howe and Ralph family details, including this mention of John: Edward and his brother John Ralph came to this country when they were young me...

Margaret Howe  was my 3rd great grandmother. Born in Ireland in about 1818, family records indicate that she met and married  Edward Martin Ralph  in Cincinnati, Ohio. (If you log into FamilySearch.org and follow the links, you can see more information about Margaret and Edward.) I have been unable to find an Ohio marriage record for them, and until recently, had no records that actually tied them to Cincinnati.  Years ago I visited the Public Library of Cincinnati in person. A librarian helped me search city directories (in book form) for the time period when Margaret Howe might have lived there. I found one possibility - a Margaret Howe, dressmaker, in 1846, on 5th between Broadway and Pike.  Margaret Howe, dressmaker, Robinson & Jones' Cincinnati directory for 1846, First Ward, p.42  The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio When I visited the library, I found no other records that could confirm this was the right Mar...