This week I have been scratching my head about how to proceed with this week’s theme of Amy Johnson Crow’s writing challenge 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. The goal is to examine your sources of information and share the unusual source that helped you solve a mystery (or even a basic find). Sometimes there are other ways you can interpret a prompt, I wish I could be creative enough to find an alternate meaning with this one, but nothing is coming to me in any form.
I’m Boring
I’ve come to the conclusion I’m boring. In a hope of discovering an odd source I’d forgotten I’ve analyzed a 67-page report of all my citations in my genealogy program. I have the regular bunch of standard items: censuses, birth certificates, death certificates, city directories, marriage licenses, newspapers, courthouse records (wills and deeds), and lastly DNA. But I guess I don’t find any of these to be “unusual” sources.
My Husband
I even asked my husband his interpretation of the prompt. He took a while to respond but was way off of what the exercise was, but hey, at least he tried.
My Unusual Source
A question I never thought to ask my Grandma when she was alive was how did she (Anna Maria Morgart) and Leroy Blair meet (to be fair, I never asked my Grandma Metzger how she met my grandfather, Harold Fairhurst, and no one seems to know that either). Even my dad never thought to ask. I wondered if maybe it happened at a Fourth of July picnic hosted by by Grandmother’s aunt, Mrs. Bartley Noggle (aka Anna Rebekah Morgart). Below is a newspaper article from the Everett Press on Friday, 7 July 1933 and for a while I really thought this picnic was how they met.
Other thoughts from when I initially found the newspaper article was how thrilled I was that my Grandma still had a relationship with her dad’s family (as he died when she was 3 in 1917).
Mrs. Wilbur May, also mentioned, was the wife of my Grandfather’s cousin, Wilbur May, who was also his best friend. My dad said he only ever saw his dad cry once and that as when Wilbur died of cardiac failure at the age of 46 in 1957.
But over the past year I have been going through photos in boxes and I recently found the following note on the back of a photo she had taken in 1933 where in her own handwriting states that she met Leroy in April 1933.
Talk about being bummed!
So it just goes to show you can come up with solid theory’s but sometimes you don’t know where you will find a fact that will shatter it. I think I preferred my Fourth of July picnic better, as now I’ll never know how they met. Unless there is another nugget of happiness on the back of a photo I’ve not yet uncovered.
As for my Grandma – along with Joe I too liked her a lot. There is a photo of him with her in this grouping of photos. But we will have to find out about him another day.
Helping History Come Alive 