Family History Find of the Day

Emily Aurelia Bird was born 24 December 1807 or 1808 in Massachusetts to Col./Rev. Nathaniel Bird and his wife Hannah Bullard. There are a LOT of trees on Ancestry that include Emily and her siblings; a lot of people have contributed to profiles on FamilySearch. No one had anything about Emily's life after her marriage to Elias Hubbard in 1829 in Westfield (Chautauqua County), New York. Emily was a mystery for  as long as I can remember . Until yesterday. Several unique documents answered at least part of the question of what happened to Emily. How I discovered her is another case study in persistence, luck, familiarity with known details, luck, the explosion of online resources, and luck. Or maybe a few nudges from the other side. That nudge started yesterday when I was looking for the box containing my research on the Annie Dean Diary. Before I found the sought-after box, I came across a document in my Grandpa Bird's handwriting, an inventory of papers found in Marion Irene ...

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...