Following Every Clue: Chasing Anthony Gomez to Find Louise Floret

Do we always see all the clues that are there? And even if we do see them do we investigate them?

Recently, I was doing some research for a client. I was struggling to find documentation for some of his ancestors. One challenge in particular is Louise Floret (1869-1924), who was born and died in New Orleans. In general, there have been lots of key records missing for her family members which has greatly hampered the research. Even though civil birth records have been consistently kept in the city since the 1830s, I have not been able to locate one for Louise. I have combed the indexing name by name for a couple years surrounding the time of her birth. Either her record never made it into the index, or one was never created for her. I suspect the latter, because the March 1869 birth date reported for her on the 1900 U.S. Census fell during the height of post Civil War chaos in the city. Because her parents were French immigrants, the chances that she was a Roman Catholic are high. I have requested a search for her baptismal record.

But her absence in U.S. Census records before her marriage was more troubling. She should have been recorded in both 1870 and 1880. After lots of flailing around, I was finally able to find her in 1870. Here is the household as it was recorded, with actual names in brackets:

John Bouret [Jean Alexandre Floret]                                  M 40 France
Louise Urswerg [Louise (Tesson) Risbourg Floret]            F 37 France
Felix Urswerg [Felix Risbourg]                                          M 12 Louisiana
Jules Urswerg [Jules Risbourg]                                           M 9 Louisiana
Louise Urswerg [Louise Floret]                                          F  0 Louisiana

The enumerator, "John O'Hirdes, Asst. Marshall" was baffled by this blended family. He incorrectly spelled all the surnames. Their French accents must have been a barrier.  He also incorrectly listed Louise, the wife of the head of household, and mother to all these children, under her first husband's name, not the name of her current husband. Then he listed the youngest child also with her mother's first husband's surname instead of that of her father, who was the head of household. Not easy to track or untangle this mess. But I used one of my favorite tricks: substitute a wildcard character, usually *, in lieu of the first consonant or two in the surname, and omit a first name.

But where was this family in 1880?  Again, a puzzling lack of records hindered the research. I still cannot locate a death record for Louise's father Jean Alexandre Floret, but it's likely he died around 1871 or so, because that's the last year he was listed in the city directory. No obituary in the mainstream newspapers, but I can try to find one in the French newspaper, for which hardly any indexing exists. I can also eventually send off for a church burial record, though not until they are done with the first batch of requests--only four at a time permitted.

I know with greater certainty another member of the household had died before 1880. Louise's half brother Felix died 3 June 1873, and there was a death record for him. So why can't I locate Louise and her mother in 1880?

I do find Louise fairly easily in 1900. By then, she has been married for almost fifteen years. She, her husband Joseph C. Simonds, and three of their children are listed at 915 Johnson St.in the fifth ward of New Orleans. All is as it should be, except for two unknown people living with them, Anthony Gomez and his one year old son Henry. They are listed respectively as brother-in-law and nephew to the head of household. Whaat?

       "United States Census, 1900," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/MS5V-VGW : accessed 29 January 2017), Jos C Simonds, 9th Precinct New Orleans city Ward 5, Orleans, Louisiana, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 51, sheet 16B, family 326, NARA microfilm publication T623 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1972.); FHL microfilm 1,240,572.

If these relationships were recorded accurately, then Anthony has to be married to either a sister of Joseph C. Simonds, the head of household, or to his wife Louise (Floret) Simonds. I know that Joseph had two sisters, but they both were married to two brothers with the surname Grand, and they were both listed in their own households. So was this Anthony Gomez married to a sister of Louise?  The only siblings I knew about for her were  her half brothers Felix and Jules Risbourg, the issue of her mother's first marriage.

I start to dig for information about Anthony and Henry Gomez.

Genealogy and Racial Identity

Yesterday morning while sitting in church I was thinking about race in the U.S. and how it relates to my field, genealogy. I wasn't really playing mental hooky because we had a guest African American preacher who was discussing racial issues. Many documents that we use to piece together our family histories contain some kind of racial identification. These categories are very distinct: black, white, Asian, etc., or sometimes the updated terms African American and Caucasian.  But racial identity can be far more complex than these labels indicate.

This past year I helped a friend of a friend with her family history. She had been gathering sources for years, and had amassed many, many documents. But she was still confused as to how to interpret and piece together the facts that she could pull from the documents. And certain pieces of the puzzle still seemed to be missing. Her family going back many generations was based in New Orleans, where my father's side of the family goes back several generations also. Even though I don't live in New Orleans any more, I have been scrutinizing area records for years.

It seemed to me that the confusion surrounded one of her direct ancestors named Eugene. We could not find a civil birth record for him or his siblings. His father was a European immigrant, but his mother was a Louisiana native who was listed under more than one surname; neither one was the same surname that her children bore. Neither could we find a marriage record for Eugene's parents. We sent off for some Roman Catholic church records, which helped. Also, we scrutinized again the U.S. census records that we could find for the family members. Conclusion: Eugene's mother was a free woman of color who was the mistress of Eugene's European immigrant father. Though some white men in New Orleans were quite open about their illegitimate mixed race offspring, Eugene's father was not, and so never registered his children's births in Orleans Parish. But Roman Catholic baptismal records for some of them exist. Some death records for Eugene and his family members also exist, but their evidence is confusing.  Some list his relatives as white, some list them as colored, and some lack any racial designation at all. It could be that the clerk who composed them was careless--or it could be that faced with a racially ambiguous family he chose not to classify them.

It turned out Eugene's mother's name varied because she used the surname of the man she had been involved with before Eugene's father on some records. Eugene himself "passed" as white. He had children with two different white women, one of whom he was married to. Then he had a long-term relationship with a woman of color, with whom he also had children. His wife then divorced him. He ended up dying at a fairly young age from tuberculosis. All this was quite a complicated story to piece together, and descendants from his different partners seemed unaware of his other families. Eugene's story was not unusual in a city that had a complex three tier racial caste system from the beginning of its history: whites, blacks, and free blacks of color who were usually mixed race.

Louisiana lawmakers have always struggled to categorize and legislate its mixed race population. For many years. if a person had just one drop of African blood, he or she was considered "black." So many blacks in Louisiana, in reality mostly Caucasian, and who did not even appear black, could still legally be born slaves. The state legislature passed a law in 1970 which attempted to mathematically define whiteness and blackness. It stated that a person with more than 1/32 “Negro blood’ was defined as black; anyone with African heritage of less than that amount could be considered white. The problems with trying to impose mathematical formulas on racial heritage were enormous, and the law was repealed in 1983.

It is my fervent hope that one day we will not have racial designations on documents any more. The heritage of too many people defies easy racial categorization. The idea of racial identity also involves cultural identity, i.e. what culture does a person most identify with, rather than mere genetics. As Martin Luther King Jr. observed, there are far more important issues than skin color.

The Man Who Had 46 Children

What do you get when you cross the Duggar family with the Brady Bunch and put it on steroids? The family of Joel Leroy Vaughn. Let me explain...

Periodically I troll certain databases plugging in various ancestors' names to see if any new hits appear.  So a couple days ago I put "Joel Vaughn" into GenealogyBank, a website with digitized old newspapers. I didn't get anything new on my Joel, but I read the following news item with amazement:

Jackson Citizen Patriot, June 13, 1884, p. 1

What a family tree this would be!  Even though this is not my family, I instantly tried to see if I could find him in the 1880 U.S. Census, the closest one to the publication date of the article. Though I checked for Joel Vaughns in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, which all could be interpreted as close to Cincinnati, I didn't have any luck.  I tried the spelling Vaughan instead. Nada.

Scowling, I returned to the list of hits on GenealogyBank where I had found the article. It was then I noticed that very similar pieces had run in several U.S. newspapers. In those days because there were no news services like United Press International, newspapers around the country simply reprinted articles they liked from other newspapers, giving credit to the source somewhere, usually either at the beginning or the end. Most of the particulars were the same in all the versions, such as the number of spouses and children. What varied was the geographical area that this man was supposed to live in . Most of the other accounts listed him as living "near Seneca City, SC." One listed the location as Seneca, N.C.!  I suppose Cincinnati sounds a bit like Seneca City if one strains the imagination a bit. Perhaps a harried typesetter had someone else reading him the piece, and he was a bit hard of hearing, and/or the noisy presses were going.

Regardless of how the error occurred, I now had a new location to search. So back to Ancestry I went. Seneca, South Carolina is located in Oconee County, in the northwest portion of the state. Eventually I pulled up a record for a Joel L. "Vaghn" household in Liberty, Pickens, South Carolina. The distance between Liberty and Seneca is about 20 miles. Here's the household:

Joel L. Vaghn    Self                   M       68             SC
Heneretta Vaghn   Wife               F      49              SC
Sarah B. Vaghn    Dau                 F      16              SC
Helena Vaghn      Dau                  F       12            SC
John R. Vaghn     Son                  M       9             SC
Nancy Morton    Stepdaughter     F      18            SC
William Morton  Stepson             M     17            SC

Ah ha! Here is an older husband with a blended family. I think this is my man.  And so I kept digging. I found him in the 1840, 1850 and 1860 censuses for Laurens County, SC, as well as this one for Pickens County in 1880. However, much to my frustration, I cannot find him in South Carolina in 1870, not under any possible name variant or misspelling. This very prolific gentleman turns out to be Joel Leroy Vaughn, born about 1811, probably in Laurens County.  After much consulting of what's out there on trees and message boards, much of which seems confused and incomplete, and poring over the available census records, I have thus far concluded that there is evidence for establishing the identityof three of his wives: Sarah "Sallie" Lucinda Moore, Sarah "Sallie" A. Johnson, and Henrietta Burts. Note: these are the maiden names of the women. Many researchers list them on trees under their married names because the second and third were widows when Joel married them. His final wife with the nursing infant mentioned in that 1884 article are still unknown. Exact years of death and marriage dates to his wives are also unknown. Some researchers suggest them, but it's always unsourced information. Part of the problem is that marriage records did not start until 1911 in South Carolina.

Another complicating wrinkle is that at the end of his life Joel moved to Duluth, Gwinnett County, Georgia near Atlanta. Several researchers think he died there in May 1889. I did find this transcription of an obituary that someone thoughtfully posted online:

Obituary of VAUGHN, JOEL LEROY    1889 Oconee, SC
Keowee Courier, August 1, 1889

    Died at Duluth, Ga., in May, 1889, Mr. Joel L. Vaughn, aged about ninety 
years.  Mr. Vaughn was a native of this county, and formerly lived in Jocassee 
Valley.  He had been living in Georgia two or more years.  He has a large 
family connection in Oconee who will regret to hear of his death.

I think this is good information except for the fact that Oconee County was not formed until 1864, much later than his birth. It was formed from Laurens County, so that must be his birthplace. Also, I think his age was exaggerated because his birth year is consistently listed in four U.S. Censuses as being about 1811, which means he was about 78 or so when he died. Likewise his age was exaggerated in the newspaper article about his large family.

Adding up all the children contained in those census enumerations, keeping in mind that I do not have the data for 1870, has only located 18 of his purported 27 natural children. There is a 19th who is mentioned on a couple trees, a Lousetta/Lucetta, but I do not think that the evidence linking her to Joel has been presented yet. I think it would be an exciting project, not to mention a service to the thousands of descendants out there, to try to crowdsource complete family group sheets for Joel Leroy Vaughn and his numerous wives and children. I have attached sources and tweaked the information listed for him on FamilyTree on www.familysearch.org. His identification number is LVGG-Q6L. I challenge the genealogical community to find the sources and facts to do so!

My New Year's Research Resolutions

This is always a good time to look back on the old year, and its accomplishments and failures, and to also look ahead to projects for the new year.  Last year's accomplishments include publishing my first book and starting to promote it, albeit in a pretty untutored way. Let's just say I could use a crash course in twenty-first century marketing, especially about leveraging social media. I completed a very involved genealogical research project for clients which involved sorting and scanning thousands of old documents and photographs, and then finding homes for them in various archives. I also attended the annual American Library Association conference and the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, where I shook hands with the impressive Elizabeth Shown Mills. I was hired for my first library consulting gig, and started this blog. I also wrote about three quarters of another book.

In 2017, the to-do list will not get any shorter. I will attend ALA midwinter, and also the Association of Library Science Educators Conference in Atlanta this month. I need to finish my second book, and find a literary agent and publisher. Because that book is a timeline of three hundred years of New Orleans history, I am under the gun to finish because the New Orleans tricentennial is in 2018. And then I would like to get back to my own research!

Thinking it over, I realized that when I return to it, I need to prioritize my efforts in the following way:

1. Ask it!  I need to come up with more oral history questions for my dad, his half sister, and his stepmother. My dad collapsed last summer due to congestive heart failure and ended up having a quadruple bypass and a valve replacement. My step grandmother is 93, and starting to lose her mental sharpness.  I must do this before this window closes forever.

2. Reduce it!  I need to systematically go through my files, make sure all the information is transferred from family group sheets onto Family Tree, and then pitch them, along with any printouts of census records and other stuff from my early researching days. There's just no point to hanging onto all this paper.

3. Scan it!  While I have scanned hundreds of old documents and photos, many more remain, especially because relatives keep giving me more. Yes, like my mother before me, I am The Keeper.  Just this week, an elderly cousin of my deceased father-in-law called to say she was sending some old letters, documents and photos.  In the batch was my husband's great grandparents' original marriage certificate!  I was amazed that in such a large family, and after a few generations, that this precious document made its way to us.  It is already scanned and on Family Tree.

                                      Marriage certificate of Henry Irvin and Deborah Irena Riegle, now in my possession.

4.  Track it!  I am determined that I will make a better effort to find information that is not either located or indexed online. I know that lots of records are hiding out in churches, local repositories, and in distant relatives' attics.  Some sleuthing and determination will reveal them. You never know who has "the stuff" in the family until you ask--absolutely everyone.

What are your research resolutions?