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 B...

My g-g-aunt Marion Irene BIRD (1839-1903) kept a signature album where friends and family recorded poems and wishes to be remembered.  My uncle, who owns the signature album, allowed me to scan it a number of years ago. Many names in the album were easily identified as Marion's siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins with ties to Warrenville, Illinois. Some of the names were totally unfamiliar, though. Who were those people? I recently determined that the next step for that album was to assemble the individual images into a single PDF that could be uploaded to FamilySearch Memories. This act not only helped identify the unknown connections in the signature album, it also became a critical link in identifying unlabeled images in a photo album of Marion's that had been donated to the  Warrenville Historical Society .  1840 Map of Orleans County, New York Dave Rumsey Map Collection Marion was one of eight children born to Frederick Bird and Louisa Goddard Warren. Her father d...

I was finally able to identify another photo from the Warrenville Historical Society  this evening. The mystery man with the long beard turns out to be Plumer Morton Woodworth, eldest child of Dr. Jacob and Ellen Douglas Bird Woodworth. The clue came from a photo of Dr. Woodworth in later life, published in  A History of the City of Chicago: Its Men and Institutions. Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens  (p. 419) and available digitally at Google Books. Take a close look at the two photos.  Notice the hairline, the shape and set of the eyes, the nose, the ears.  I'm comfortable with saying that the unlabeled photo is definitely Plumer Morton Woodworth. This conclusion also fits with the photo's placement in the album. (It follows individual photos of Jacob Woodworth and Ellen D. Bird Woodworth.) Dr. Plumer Morton Woodworth about 1878 Dr. Plumer Morton Woodworth about 1900 Like his father, Plumer Woodworth was a doctor. ...

Clara Amy Smith Bird was born in 1841 in frontier Illinois. Her parents were Joel and Amy Bartholomew Smith, early pioneers of DuPage County, Illinois. This photo of her is dated 1891. I had the photo for quite a few years before I noticed the small white ribbon pinned to her dress. It didn't look like a piece of jewelry or other embellishment. Why was she wearing a white ribbon? While scanning old family photos in Chicago a couple of years ago, I came across this picture of a group of fourteen women. There was no explanation of the grouping on the back of the photo, and I took it to be some kind of family gathering. I'd looked at that image quite a few times before I noticed the photo that one woman near the front is holding. When I enlarged it enough to take a good look at the small photo in the woman's hand, I was amazed to realize that I had seen that face before! It was the same 1891 photo I had of my great-great-grandmother, Clara Smith Bird. Only then...

This little pixie captured my attention because the picture had substantial clues (and darling little leather shoes), but not certain identity. The photo is part of an album belonging to the Warrenville Historical Society in Warrenville, Illinois. The album includes photos of Warren family descendants, including some of my direct-line ancestors. I had never seen the photo before (unlike some of the other photos, which were duplicates of photos that were part of my great-grandfather Frederick Joel Bird's collection). What I knew: The photo was of a little girl named (I thought) Sophie who was three years old in 1896. That much was handwritten on the photo. On the back of the photo was the name and address of a photographer in St. Louis. What I didn't know was Sophie's last name and her relationship to the Warrens. I tried searching HeritageQuest for little Sophie, but could not find anyone who matched the details I had from the photo. This week, though, all that chang...

Hattie W. Woodworth (1861-1948) was the daughter of Jacob and Ellen Bird Woodworth. In 1882, she married Henry Lockwood, a farmhand who worked for her family in McHenry County, Illinois. Hattie's grandmother (and my g-g-g-grandmother), Louisa Goddard Warren Bird, mentioned the marriage in a letter to her sons Byron and Henry in December of 1882: "Hattie was married the 5th of Sept. to a Mr. Lockwood a poor young man we like him very much perhaps he may have 6,00 dollars laid by he is a farmer, worked for Eddie, a year before they were married, so they became well acquainted with him." Henry and Hattie spent the first 30 years of their marriage in Illinois, and somehow ended up in California in the early 1900's. Henry died between the 1920 and 1930 censuses, probably in California. She died in Los Angeles in 1948. Hattie was a cousin to my great-grandfather, Frederick Joel (FJ) Bird. In the 1940's, FJ Bird began corresponding with Hattie and several other ...