Anytime someone asks me to list my top number X of anything, I have to think about it for a while, as I did with this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission: Impossible! music), is:
1. Check out Top Five Surprises by D. M. Debacker on the Gathering Leaves blog.
2. What are your top five surprises you have found in your genealogy research and family history work?
3. Tell us about your surprises in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook comment.
My surprises come from more than 50 years of research.
1. My paternal grandfather, Bertram Lynn Sellers, was born out of wedlock and was not the biological son of the man my great-grandmother Laura May Armstrong married. This revelation, which I later proved with Y-DNA, came to me when I suddenly began to wonder why, if my great-grandfather had loved his stepfather so much as to name a son after him, he would name his second son after him, while naming his first son after a "close family friend."
See "I'm Apparently a Sellers by Informal Adoption"
2. I had been told that my maternal grandfather's brother Rubin Meckler had been born and had died very young in the Russian Empire, before my great-grandparents immigrated to the United States. I was amazed to discover him in the 1915 New York Census and then find his birth and death dates in the New York City indices.
See "Surprising Discovery in the New York Census"
3. My great-grandmother Jane Dunstan was six months pregnant when she married my great-grandfather Thomas Kirkland Gauntt in 1891. She had immigrated here from England only a year before.
See "Two Truths and One Lie"
4. My great-grandmother Laura May Armstrong had an out-of-wedlock child, Bertolet Grace Sellers, three years after her husband had died. She declined to name the father on both Bertolet's birth certificate and death certificate (she died at 6 years old).
See "Could 'Bertram' and 'Bertolet' Be Named for the Same 'Bert'?"
5. My grandfather, Bertram Lynn Sellers, was registered as a girl named Gertrude L. on his original birth certificate. I still have no credible explanation as to why.
See "An Administrative Change of Sex"
You have had some excellent surprises in terms of learning family history. As for Bertram and Gertrude, the middle initials are the same. Might a clerk have written down some names of children to record on the certificates when he had time and then misread Bertram as Gertrude? Tall letter at the beginning, middle letters are the same shape and then maybe a messy M at the end read as D or DE? Just an idea.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about the mistake in terms of looking at the name but as hearing it. I think your idea is equally plausible. My sister had the highly entertaining suggestion that it was a deliberate ploy by our great-grandmother to obscure the birth and make it look as though it were a girl.
DeleteGreat examples and I love how you included a link to your posts.
ReplyDeleteThank you! I was happy that I had posted about all of these surprises, so that I had links to use!
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