First Brick Wall part 2

In my last post I talked about getting past my first brick wall, which for a budding genealogist was probably the best brick wall for me to start with. The information I needed was there and while it took some time it helped me understand the resources available to me.

In this post I will show you all the possible pitfalls of trusting one source for information. Anna's date of birth has been given as different dates and years in various documents. This is why one should note all known differences and cite your sources for all the information you collect, one so you know where you've obtained it, and two how credible that source is.

After finding Anna's death certificate I tried locating her grave. This proved to be somewhat difficult as Western Cemetery would not give out information on the phone, nor did they answer my letters I had sent, which included a SASE. So, off to Baltimore I went, taking with me a distant cousin that was interested in Anna's history as well. Western Cemetery is quite big, Find a Grave lists almost 9000 interments. Luckily, my cousin's husband was along and he found the grave quickly. What was written on the stone was quite surprising though.

Anna's DOB is listed as April 9, 1909, not only the wrong day, but also the wrong year. I know this DOB can't be true as her first daughter, my great aunt, was born it 1922, which would make Anna 13 at the time. This would be one of my first major lessons in sources, they can be really wrong.

About a year later I was able to find and contact one of my great half uncles, one of Anna's children from her second marriage. He had some paperwork that shed some light on what had most likely happened with the tombstone.

This is the receipt for her tombstone, while not a great scan, one can make out where it mos likely says April 4, 1904, but the way the 4s are written make it look more like a 9. Plus the fact that the tombstone has been redone/edited twice shows how easy it is for errors to perpetuate.

The other way I got an approximate DOB was through the census records. After finding her maiden name I was able to find her in the 1910 and 1920 censuses living with her parents.

 The top image is from the 1910 census, enumerated in late April, the bottom image is from the 1920 census and enumerated in early March. Assuming that the person who gave the information was correct, that puts Anna's birthday in March or April of 1904.

In 1930 we can find Anna living by herself in Baltimore.

 This census was enumerated on the 5th of April, but notice how she's listed as being 25, which if correct that puts her birthday after the 5th of April. There is the possibility that she didn't really think about how old she was, or the enumerator put the wrong date down. There are two more important clues in this census, she still lists herself as being married, and her age at first marriage is 16. This will help later when looking for her marriage license.

 In the 1940 census, the most current one and the last she will be counted in, we find her living with her second husband and children. The 'X' by her name says she supplied the information. Notice now how she's lost a couple of years of her age by stating she's only 34. Since the census was enumerated in late April she would have been 36, one has to wonder if she did so to not look too much older then her husband.


Without a known birth certificate, while Maryland did require them in the late 1890s not everyone applied for them, we're left with only a couple of more records to find her DOB. The first would be some sort of baptismal record and another would be her marriage record. I have not been able to determine which, if any, church Anna's family attended so I have no records of her birth.

This is Anna and Earl's marriage license, from July 1920, her listed age, 18. This puts her at being born in 1902, though no other records bear this out.

With as much of the normal information I have gathered there is a wide range of dates for Anna, ranging from 1902-1909. The dates of 1902 and 1909 are wrong, if she was the one giving the information to obtain her marriage license she probably couldn't say she was 16 without parental consent, while the 1909 is wrong due to bad penmanship. With the exception of one census record, all dates point to her year of birth as 1904 and birth month as April. The best date that I have come across is April 4, 1904, which is the date I've gone with in my database.

My first brick wall

Any genealogist knows brick walls can be frustrating, but in some ways, they are the most fun to try and figure out. My first brick wall came with enough of a crack in it to help bring it down.

My family knew little about my grandmother's mother. Not only did she leave her family in the late 1920s/early 1930s, she also died young. When I started looking at my family history my grandmother had already died and both of her sisters would say little about their mother. All I had to go on was a name, Anna Laura.

The stories that I had heard about was that my great grandmother had  left one day and moved to Baltimore. I was also told that her children had no contact with her after she left and no one knew what had happened to her. The family did know she had gotten remarried and had a second. The only other piece of information I knew was that one of her children had died while in the military. Other than that, nothing:  no birth date, no date or place of death, just a blank.

Since this was back in 2008 a lot of things were not online yet. Add that to the fact I didn't know exactly what I was looking for or where to start and it was hard to know how to approach my brick wall. In hindsight I should have gone to the most obvious place, the Frederick courthouse, to find her marriage certificate.  However, at the time I didn't know they kept such records.

My first break came when I asked my aunt if she might know anything. She didn't, but she did give me my grandmother's bible which provided  me with my first clue: I was able to obtain Anna's date of death.

  

And there it was, my first break, not only a date of death, but her last name of Florey. This was at least a starting point, now I could go look up an obituary. The only problem was that she had died in Baltimore, and the closest and easiest place for me to see the microfilm was the University of Maryland. I was at least able to get this:

There is however, one problem with this short death notice, she's been given the maiden name of Castle, which is wrong. But, at least I've gotten an approximate age, 43, meaning she was born around 1904. I also have a place of interment, Western Cemetery.

My next step was to head to the Maryland State Archives to find a death certificate. Such a confusing place, especially for someone who's never been there before. After finally getting through all the strange hoops they seem to have, I was able to get a printed copy of her death certificate from the microfilm. Finally the wall begins to fall.

Finally, I get a date of birth, maiden name and parents names, if all the information given is correct. Notice the nee from the death notice is Castle, which is her mother's Maiden name.

So now, I have a good amount of information, date of birth, given as April 4, 1904, date of death, November 22, 1947, maiden name of Kessler, and parent's names, William Kessler and Alberta Castle.

In my next post I will cover finding other information about her, and why her date of birth may not be correct and why it was so difficult to figure out what the truth might be.