Nigh on two years ago, I stumbled across a cemetery and ended up spending two full days on-site with it. Plus hours and hours doing research back in the warren. Read that story here.
The important thing to know is that I photographed all the headstones. Many had never been photographed before. Or, if they had been, the image was less than good.
Fast-forward to last week. Someone sent me a gracious Thank-You for the photo of someone in her family tree. That triggered my looking back at that family in the cemetery. One thought led to another, and the next thing I know, I am back in full-fledged research mode.
The family name, and one individual's name, in particular, kept tickling the back of my thoughts. I was just so familiar. Sure enough, it appeared in my tree as what I call a "marredinta." That is, someone who married into the family. In this case, a distant cousin. But, looking at the details, it could not be the same person. The date of birth was off by several decades.
Could they be related, though? Keep digging. I will spoil that part of the story by telling you upfront that there is no relationship that I can find.
All that research took me down the proverbial rabbit hole. I was able to prove that two of the graves were of a father and infant son. That proof came from the father's will in which he explicitly named his wife, daughter, and infant son.
Sadly, that son only survived his father by a scant three months. At least I was able to link their memorials.
I could not let things drop there, so I kept on to see if I could also find the wife/mother and also link her memorial to the infant son.
She, it turned out, remarried about two years after becoming a widow. I found her listed in the 1900 census along with the daughter and mother-in-law of her first husband, her second husband, and another infant son who was just short of one year old. There could be no question that I had the right person. Indeed, the daughter was even listed as "Step-daughter." All of which brings us to the mystery I teased in the title.
With the 1900 Census, women were asked how many children they had born, and how many were living. You have to feel a pang when you see a woman listed as having born many childre, yet only a fraction of them were still alive. Or worse, none survived. I have seen a few cases where a woman had given birth to over a dozen children and, none survived.
So, here I am, reading of one woman whom I know to have born three children, one of whom died four days before reaching his sixteenth month. And the other two are living in the same house as she. I read across the census columns to the children's counts.
1 born and 1 living.
How the hell did that get reported? I mean, I could understand if the memory of that first son was too painful to bring up. But with two children living in the house, how do you report just one?!
Add this to the long and growing list of questions I will never be able to answer.
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