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?

How Cousin Barney Got His Name

Sometimes when we pursue our family history research, it's easy to see how family members got their names. Some families recycle the same names through several generations, even having first cousins of approximately the same age with exactly the same name because the cousins were named for the same grandparent. For example, my great grandmother was baptized Pelagia because Sicilian naming customs dictate that the second daughter is named for the maternal grandmother. She had a first cousin also named Pelagia, another second daughter.

But sometimes names are given not to honor family members, but other people or things that the parents admire. Such turned out to be the case with my Cousin Barney's name. Who is Cousin Barney? In my perpetual quest to find more family lore and photographs, I track distant cousins. Well, maybe the stuff ended up in their branch, not mine, right? And so I found Barney, my second cousin twice removed who was also interested in family history. When I first contacted him about five years ago, he was the sole caregiver for his wife who had Alzheimer's. All he could manage was the occasional short phone conversation, or a brief letter. Barney lives four hours away, and does not do email, but his wife's steadily worsening condition meant that visits were out of the question.

Last winter, his wife passed away.  I wanted to invite Barney to visit me when the weather warmed up, but life intervened. My father ended up having a quadruple bypass and valve replacement. I spent the summer going back and forth between Florida where he lives and Illinois, where my home is. More time passed, and a few weeks ago, a letter appeared from Barney asking when we could get together.  As he pointed out, he is 88 and who knows how much longer he is going to be able to travel.This galvanized me. I called and said "Come as soon as possible!" He had to come to us because I still have a couple kids at home.

Barney arrived bearing several large photo albums and many, many stories. We had a fascinating visit. I recorded  him talking about growing up in the New Orleans area in the 1930s and 1940s, and we identified and scanned photos. Because I had done more research, I was able to identify some family members that exceeded even his considerable memory. He was able to give me an understanding of many of our ancestors' personalities, an aspect that the research does not always uncover. By the end of the visit, I asked him, "Barney, how did you get your name?"  He tilted his head to the side and looked at me quizzically.

                                                         
                                               Cousin Barney and I during our visit. Selfie courtesy of us.

His full name is Barney McCoy Landry Jr. I look at that name and think that he and his father must have been named for somebody in particular. Were there McCoys in his father's family that we don't know about? But Barney had no idea why he and his father had been given that name. He said jokingly, "Well, I have eliminated Barney Oldfield, Barney Fife and Barney Rubble as being the person I was named after." Okay, great. But I was curious, because I could not remember any figures from U.S. history with this name.

We had about fifteen minutes before he needed to hit the road so that he would be driving back home in daylight.  I googled "Barney McCoy." I started finding the names of several other men whose first and middle names were Barney McCoy followed by different surnames. Interesting. Clearly others had also been named for a Barney McCoy, and they didn't necessarily seem to be related. Several, but not all were born in the 1890s like Cousin Barney's father. One man was listed on the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington D.C., and clearly was much younger than the other Barney McCoy Somethings. Then I started to come across references to a song.

On Google Books I found  The Alabama Folk Lyric: A Study in Origins and Media of Dissemination by Ray Broadus Browne. Under the heading "Unhappy Love Songs" the author discusses a song called, you guessed it, "Barney McCoy" beginning on page 123. He states that it was a widely popular song in the 1870s, but that someone did not think to print up the words and music until 1881. Subsequently, it appeared in dozens of songsters, or sheet music collections. This is very interesting in light of the fact that Barney's grandmother was born and raised in Baldwin County, Alabama.

Song lyrics documented by Ray Broadus Browne, courtesy Google Books

                                            

Catharine Serena (White) Freeman Landry was born in March of 1859 to Asa J. White and Isabella Presley. She and her first husband Harry Freeman moved to Newton, Texas at some point in the mid 1880s between the births of their second and third children. Harry died in 1890 and was buried in the Watson Chapel Cemetery in Bleakwood. A historical marker explains that most of the people resting in that place worked in the lumber industry in Bleakwood.  So we have a probable motivation for why the Freemans moved there. Baldwin County Alabama, where they came from, also had a large lumber industry as well as a turpentine factory.

The names of the three Freeman children all appear to be family names. But in 1891 Catharine remarried, this time to a French immigrant named Emile J. Landry. She had three additional children with him, and all three of them have names that were outside of the family, after some famous individual, or in her son Barney's case, after a song that Catharine must have adored in her youth. Her youngest son was named Henry Ward Beecher Landry, after the minister, abolitionist, lecturer, and womanizer, Henry Ward Beecher, who was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.  A biography of Beecher by Debby Applegate is entitled The Most Famous Man in America. Beecher was a household name, widely published and widely quoted, and he embarked on a lecture tour of The West in 1884. Could Catharine have heard him speak and then later named a son for him?  Maybe.

Catharine's first child with Monsieur Landry was named Jesse Corbet Landry. Again, I have found many men named Jesse Corbet followed by another surname, but thus far I have not figured out if Jesse Corbet was either a living or legendary individual. There was a Jesse Corbet enumerated in the 1866 Alabama State Census, but more research is needed to say whether he is the namesake.

How did Barney react to the knowledge that it's highly probable that his name came from an old Alabama folk song? With great excitement! After I pieced together that theory, I went onto YouTube to see if I could find a recording.  As we listened to the old scratchy rendition of the song, tears filled his eyes.  An understanding of how we got our names is a crucial part of everyone's identity.

                                              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t1qAYgNang

Tracking Down the Right Dates

It all started when I was trying to figure out some dates. Well, a lot of dates, actually.  I am writing a book called Resilient City: A Timeline of New Orleans History. One of the reasons why I started this project is that the city's tricentennial is in 2018. Another is that I have done so much background research about New Orleans that it would be nice to have it all organized in some kind of chronological fashion so that I can easily locate facts for my family history research. But I digress...
So I decided that because Mardi Gras is such an important part of the city's cultural heritage, that I should figure out the dates and add them to the timeline--the dates of all 300 Mardi Gras celebrations.

That turned out to be easy for the mid-twentieth century on. The New Orleans Public Library has a list of Mardi Gras dates from 1948 forward on their website. Thank you NOPL!

But how was I going to fill in the dates for all the Mardi Gras from 1947 back to 1718? Hmm...I decided it might be easier to locate a list for Ash Wednesdays rather than Mardi Gras, so I googled "historic Ash Wednesday dates" and bam, I found the website called "Easter Dates from 1901 to 2078" by the University of Bamberg in Germany. Danke schoen.

Now I could subtract a day off the Ash Wednesday dates and have my Mardi Gras dates. But that still left 1900 back to 1718. Back to the Google search results. There was the website of the U.S. Navy Astronomical Department.  Yes, the U.S. Navy.  They have a search box where one can type in a year and receive the dates of its Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. And, glory be, it went back to 1583, the beginning of the Gregorian calendar. Semper Fortis.

So then it was a little tedious, because I had to type in the years one at a time into the search box, but then I would be rewarded with the Ash Wednesday date for the year which was easily adjusted to my Mardi Gras date.  I was feeling smug--until I hit the first year in which Ash Wednesday fell on March 1.  The problem there is that during Leap Year, February has 29 days instead of 28.  So then I had to figure out if the particular year I was looking at with the March 1 Ash Wednesday was a leap year or not.  How to do that?

This is where my reference librarian training comes in really handy!  I knew that I could determine that by using a perpetual calendar, which is a  list of different calendar formats which correlates to another list which identifies which calendar format applied to which year.  So by consulting the perpetual calendar, I knew when the March 1 Ash Wednesdays had a February 29 Mardi Gras, and which had a February 28 Mardi Gras. Are you with me? So it took a couple hours to work through all 300 years, but eventually I had the correct Mardi Gras dates plugged into the timeline.

Perpetual calendars can also help with other date identification problems. Have you ever run across a document which refers to something happening on a day of the week, but you don't know which date that was? I do, and so find myself turning to the perpetual calendar often for help. They were formerly located only in print almanacs, but now are available online for free.

A little know-how can help us to solve date quandaries in our research, and to record precise dates for events.

Figuring Out Where They Worshipped

Religious records can be enormously helpful.  They provide information about individuals and families when civil records are missing, incomplete or incorrect. They sometimes provide more information than the equivalent civil record provides. For example, the marriage record of a religious institution might list the full names of the bride and groom, while the civil record only lists first and last names.  Also, because the religious officiant was often of the same ethnicity as the people he was creating records for, and literally spoke their language, he may record details that are more, well, detailed! For example, a civil record may list Germany or Ireland as a birthplace, while the church record would list Talge, near Bersenbruck in Hanover or County Cavan in Ireland.

So we are all in agreement that church records are valuable, but here's the tricky part: how do you figure out which church your ancestors attended? Okay, here is where we separate the men from the boys, as the old expression goes. Truly determined researchers are willing to engage in the detective work that is often necessary to figure this out, and then additional effort to track where the records now reside. Here are some approaches that have worked for me...

Abandon Assumptions

Sometimes, we think we know what religion ancestors were, but either they changed religions, or because a religious institution of their denomination was not available where they lived, they attended a church of a different denomination from the one you assumed they attended. Yes, assumptions about our ancestors can hinder our research process greatly! So instead let's look for clues about what the correct religion really was.

Finding Clues in Other Sources

1. Work backwards and check sources that the ancestors generated last. First look at death notices and obituaries. They are not the same thing, and there may be both. Death notices list the bare bones details of how and where a person died. Obituaries list more information about the deceased including surviving family members, biographical details, and details about the interment and any accompanying religious services.

You probably looked for these in the local paper where the person died. But have you looked in the papers in other localities where the person lived including the birthplace? Have you looked in not just the mainstream local paper, but in ethnic newspapers that match the deceased's background?What about publications of the deceased's church, fraternal/social organizations, and college/university? Have you checked the newspaper where his siblings and children lived at the time of his death? These are all possibilities, and sometimes the information in different publications can vary.

This obituary appeared in the May 22, 1903 Jessamine Journal, a newspaper in the area where the deceased's sister lived. No obituary for Dr. Hollis has yet been found in Kansas newspapers where he lived.

Even if the obituary does not come right out and say which church the deceased attended, it may provide the name of a religious officiant. Ah ha.  Now we can try to figure out where the officiant worked. How? First, I always try a simple Google search putting the name in quotation marks. And I try a lot of name variations. For example:

"Rev Louis Kohlmann"  "Rev L. Kohlmann" "Lewis Kohlmann" and Kohlmann minister Chicago

If the obituary holds no clues to the religion at all, it may still list the undertaker, or the death certificate will. Sometimes the undertaker's records list which religious officiant presided.

2. The place of interment itself may be a clue. The cemetery may be affiliated with a current or defunct place of worship. This may be obvious (e.g. St. John's Lutheran Cemetery) or it may be hidden because the cemetery has had a name change over the years. Do your background research on that cemetery. Also, some cemeteries that are non-denominational are sub-divided into sections that are for members of specific organizations or religious groups.

3. Look at articles in county histories and other biographical reference works. They sometimes list both religious and political affiliations.

This article in the History of Clay and Owen Counties, Indiana, p. 431, shows that Mr. and Mrs. Holmes belong to different churches!



4. Civil marriage records such as licenses and returns are another place to check, because both can list the name of the party who performed the ceremony. If this person is a civil servant such as a judge or a justice of the peace, then you are out of luck. Either the bride and groom were not particularly religious, or a religious officiant was not handy, or they were of different faiths and it was too hard to decide whose religious leader to use for the wedding ceremony.

                                      Cook County, Illinois civil marriage record of  my great grandparents.

This is the marriage license of my great grandparents Carl Brandstetter and Maria Wiederer, Austrian immigrants who married in Chicago in 1909. It lists the officiant as "Rev. Louis Kohlmann" of the German Evangelical Fredens [sic] Church. I could find nothing googling that church name, but using the variant search terms technique for the minister's name worked to find information. Some of the hits included newspaper articles, references to him in others' genealogical research, and digitized books on Google Books and Internet Archive that listed religious and charitable institutions. Kohlman's church was more typically called the Church of Peace. I also discovered it was located at the corner of Josephine and 52nd Streets.  Another reference on Rootsweb explained that the church had moved and changed its name and denominational affiliation over the years.  It was now the Palos Park Memorial United Church of Christ, located in suburban Palos Park. They still hold the records.

            Maria Wiederer and Carl Brandstetter's wedding photograph, 1908. Courtesy of  Joan Johnston Wedemeyer.

I shared this with my mother, who first phoned the church office, and then, when the secretary was having trouble locating the record, asked permission to drive over and examine the church book herself. So she did, and found that their June 1908 marriage was not recorded in the book until six months later, at the very end of the 1908 marriage records section. Apparently, Rev. Kohlmann had forgotten to write it down soon after conducting the marriage, but remembered it several months later, just as he was starting the the new section in the book for the 1909 marriages.

        The marriage record of Charles [Carl] Brandstetter and Mary [Maria] Wiederer at the Church of Peace in Chicago, now the Palos Park Peace Memorial United Church of Christ, 10300 W. 131st St., Palos Park, Illinois.

This should teach us to be very thorough in our searches, and to examine all records personally when possible.  Now, one might assume that this couple belonged to this congregation because they were married there. Nope. A search of the membership lists did not turn them up, although a Henry Brandstetter was found, who may have been a relative of the groom. We know from family knowledge that the bride was Catholic, and that the groom was an Evangelical protestant who disliked the Catholic church, but tolerated his children being raised as Catholics. We also know that the protestant ceremony was a concession to the groom, but that the bride longed for a Catholic ceremony as well.  She did not get her wish for many years, but it finally occurred on April 22, 1931 at Sacred Heart Church in Chicago. So one has to search for additional church records for this family in multiple religious institutions in a range of years outside the norm.