“Wall” is For…

When it comes to nicknames, what may seem at first to be clues can turn out to be misleading.

There is a photograph tucked among my grandmother’s belongings that had me stumped for a long time. Unlike those many snapshots we all find in our elder relatives’ collections, this one actually was labeled. On the reverse of the picture, written in my grandmother’s distinctive hand using a green, fine point pen, was the explanation:

Wall Smith

March 1949

For the longest time, I figured the name “Wall” was doomed to signify “Brick Wall”—only the most recent in a long line of puzzles I wasn’t solving very successfully.

Then, while working on my mother’s cousin Sarah Martha Moore McKinnon’s line, I realized from a letter Sarah Martha’s mother Lummie had written that “Wall” was a nickname for Sarah Martha’s father, Wallace Moore.

“Wall is for Wallace,” I thought triumphantly to myself, and raced back through my files to find that abandoned—and totally unrelated—photograph of Wall Smith. Now, all I had to do was search through online records for a Wallace Smith to figure out who this mystery person was!

Well…everyone knows what it is like to search for someone named Smith. Even knowing this picture likely came from my grandmother’s roots in Florida, I couldn’t make any names, dates and circumstances come together sufficiently to reveal who “Wallace Smith” might be. The only thing I could do to provide any further hints was to blow the thing up on PhotoShop and look for details in the photographic field.

I did find one: the doormat at the entry of the official-looking building just behind Wall Smith bore the legend, “Bank of.” But Bank of what? The rest of the label was cut out of the picture.

Thankfully, we all benefit from the comments blog readers share, and I was most grateful for A Family Tapestry reader Far Side, who suggested I sort all my mystery photos by size and even by border design. Doing so, I found three other prints of that design—all, by the way, labeled by my grandmother with that same date: March, 1949. Evidently, my grandmother had taken a trip and visited a number of people at that time.

One of those other photos featured Wall Smith and a woman. They were standing in front of the same imposing building as I had seen in the other picture. On the reverse of this snapshot, my grandmother had written:

Lula and Wall

March 1949

While I still knew absolutely nothing of who this “Wall” might be, “Lula” provided me with a big hint. My grandmother had a childhood friend from Fort Meade named Lula. While I had never heard my grandmother talk about Lula, I had seen enough written notes about this friend to recall her full name: Lula Childers. But even then, I needed my mother’s cousin to clue me in on the correct pronunciation—it’s not CHILD-ers, like we would pronounce the word “child,” but the name was pronounced with a short “i” as in CHILL-ders.

Could Lula Childers be the “Lula” who was “Wall” Smith’s wife? I took a look at what could be found at FamilySearch.org. Sure enough, there was a Lula Virginia Childers who married someone by the name of William Wall Smith in Hernando County, Florida, on July 20, 1948. Likely, that “Wall” came from William’s mother’s maiden name.

Just in case there were more than one Lula Childers in Florida at that time, it was encouraging to find the Application for Marriage License also at FamilySearch.org. There, I learned that Lula was forty eight years of age at the time of her marriage, and that she was a school teacher. More important was that little detail on the document revealing that she was born in Fort Meade.

The application form also told me that forty five year old William “Wall-Smith” lived in Clearwater, had been born in Tampa, and was a bank clerk. The photo I had found of the mysterious “Wall” was likely taken just outside the front door of his place of employment. And, taking this second photograph of Lula and Wall, treating it the same way with PhotoShop as I had done to the other picture, I could see on the doormat the last three letters of the conclusion to the label, “Bank of —.” Whatever the name, I could now tell the mat was labeled, “Bank of —ter.”

Clearwater?

Finding the dots connected between the mysterious “Wall” Smith and the Lula Childers I knew to be my grandmother’s friend, it now opened the way for me to muddle through the other two photographs with that same border design. Though they contained no surnames in their labels, the clues from these first two photographs were enough to get me started on another productive search.

A Melancholy Homecoming

Anyone who had followed the Davis and Moore family returning in 1952 to Erwin, Tennessee, from Wallace and Lummie’s new retirement residence in Phoenix was joining in a somber gathering. True, it must have been difficult to have lost Wallace Moore in such an abrupt and tragic manner. But a return to the Davis family home town also accentuated the fact that there were more who had gone on before than there were still among the living.

For whatever reason the choice was made, Wallace Moore—and later, his wife, Lummie Davis Moore—planned to return to their roots at the time of their burial. They were buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Erwin, as were many of Lummie’s relatives.

When Lummie returned to Tennessee with the remains of her husband, she was no doubt joined by her daughter and son-in-law, Sarah Martha and Cyril J. McKinnon. Lummie’s next youngest sister, Mabel Martin, likely soon arrived by rail from New Jersey. And Jack Davis, their baby brother from Columbus, Ohio, would have been there too, along with his wife, Ruth.

Their youngest sister, Mary Chevis, would not have been with them, though. She had lost her life to cancer nearly ten years prior, having not even attained the age of fifty. Her husband, H. M. Chitwood, had preceded Chevis by nearly three decades.

And their mother, Martha Cassandra Boothe Davis, though long-lived herself (to eighty eight years of age), had passed away six years prior. Their father, William D. Davis, had been gone for over forty years.

Funerals serve that double reminder of those others who are no longer there to carry that newest loss in the family. I imagine, in the Evergreen Cemetery after Wallace Moore’s burial, family members wandered to spot headstones of those they remembered from times past—perhaps to mourn again and, thankfully, to reminisce.

Though I’ve found enough of a stash of remembrances about Lummie and her family in my aunt’s personal papers, there is nothing I can find on her sister Chevis, and not much more than a newspaper clipping regarding Mabel. Even so, I’d like to add to that limited stash from what I’ve been able to find through my own research. In the next few days, please join me as I review more railroad trivia, tales of workplace hazards turned tragic, missing children and glimpses of girlhood dreams of glamour. Each of these Davis siblings—and their stories—needs to be remembered, if only for a moment.

What About Wallace?

You may have wondered, in all the details of Lummie Davis Moore’s recuperation from her serious fall in May, 1962, who the man was behind her relieved exclamation that, “Thank God and Wallace Moore I can take care of it myself.”

It was easy to assume that Wallace Moore was Lummie’s husband. And, from the few remarks that peppered the narrative, that he was long dead.

Then, too, in the earlier posts on this family’s life with their young daughter, Sarah Martha Moore McKinnon, we discovered that the reason they were living in Honduras was on account of his occupation with the railroads of that country.

From governmental documents, we’ve been able to glean the facts about his parentage—father named Mose Moore and mother reported to have the maiden name Sarah Good—and his birthplace in the little town in eastern Tennessee named Limestone.

I can’t, however, say I knew much about the man, himself, though. He seemed to be the quintessential invisible corporate man.

Once I realized, in transcribing those letters from Lummie to her brother Jack, that she was closing in on the date of her death, I had pulled up a copy of her death certificate from Arizona’s free online resource to check all the details. In doing that, it occurred to me that, though he was buried in Tennessee, perhaps Wallace had also died in Arizona.

I decided to try my luck at looking up his death certificate in that same website.

It was there.

I wasn’t quite prepared to learn what I saw, once I read over the details of this document. How difficult a time it must have been for Lummie.

Just to double check the details (after all, one can never be entirely sure with just one documented report), I tried my hand at finding his obituary online.

Once again, I found what I was seeking: a news report-cum-obituary confirming the details I had just learned. It was published in The Arizona Republic on Saturday, August 23, 1952. Apparently—and for no reason I’d ever be able to glean—Lummie’s husband chose, one afternoon in their home in Phoenix, to take his own life.

In addition to his wife, the only other survivor listed was his daughter, not yet married but living in Baltimore, Maryland.

How little there was to know about his life. He took his secrets with him.

            The body of Wallace Moore, 76, who was found dead with a bullet wound in his head in his home Thursday, will be taken to Erwin, Tenn., for funeral services and burial.

            Sheriff's deputies said investigation indicated that Mr. Moore had committed suicide. He lived at 5319 N. Seventh Ave.

            Born in Limestone, Tenn., Mr. Moore came to Phoenix about two years ago. He had lived in Honduras for 30 years and was a retired superintendent of the mechanical department of the United Fruit Co. there.

            Survivors include his wife, Lumie, of Phoenix, and a daughter, Miss Sarah Martha Moore, of Baltimore, Md.

Confusion Despite Official Documents

Sometimes, in researching our family history, the data dump can morph into an avalanche of dull, dry dates, places and names. With the information overload we subject ourselves to by focusing on getting the facts, we can find ourselves losing sight of the people we originally sought to know.

I confess that exact thing happened as I was collecting the details for Lummie Davis Moore, the woman whose two letters I had just transcribed and posted here in the past week.

Even in the midst of attempting to draw up a timeline of her life to help sift through the clues, I missed one very important fact. In the middle of the narrative of these two letters, I lost sight of the woman’s impending death. It wasn’t until just a few days ago, when in the process of pasting the hyperlink to her page on my very outdated yet publicly-accessible Rootsweb tree, I happened to notice the year of her death: 1962.

“That’s funny,” I thought to myself, “That’s the same year as these letters.”

“Huh?!”

Yes, wallowing in the midst of all this family history overload, I got slapped in the face by that very detail. I have no idea how I had missed it.

It was sad to realize that—even disappointing. It was as if I were reliving that episode in my grand-aunt’s life with her, hoping for the best for her recovery.

Yes, Lummie was infused with an upbeat attitude, seemed restless and full of energy despite her serious injury—but, as often happened to those whose aging hips suffered a fracture, while focusing on the bone that needed mending, the patient was caught unawares with a side effect of the long healing process.

In many cases, the risk to those recuperating from hip repair is pneumonia. As it turned out in Lummie’s case, her decline was not at all that type of lingering misery, but an almost instantaneous attack: she fell to a case of coronary thrombosis. According to the death certificate, length of time between onset and death was five minutes.

While the quickness of the attack may have been merciful for Lummie, I can only imagine how brutal the news must have been for her daughter. Sarah Martha, recently returned home in the Baltimore, Maryland, area with a newborn daughter of her own, was too far removed from Lummie’s Phoenix home to know anything more than the type of news her mother had been sharing with her own brother in the letters we’ve just read.

Piecing together the story now—over fifty years later—I’m encountering a lot of gaps. The fact that there are discrepancies in the official documents doesn’t help. While I’m overjoyed to see the State of Arizona provide genealogical researchers with free access to their online death records through—thankfully!—the year 1962, I’m a bit stymied by the fact that some dates and details don’t line up in the certificate issued after Lummie’s passing.

According to Lummie’s death certificate, she was the daughter of Will David, which of course should be Davis. That became the first clue tipping me off that this document may not be one hundred percent reliable. Of course, it’s pretty hard to demand any family member to answer a barrage of questions one hundred percent accurately under duress of a family death. Perhaps that is why Lummie’s son-in-law, C. J. McKinnon, was listed as the informant instead of her own daughter.

However, when it comes to the date of death, that would seem to be factual information—not something swayed by how distraught the family might have been feeling.

Yet, the death certificate indicates Lummie’s date of death to have been July 19, 1962.

That causes problems when we seek out her obituary record. First, though Lummie claimed many friends in her residence of the past twelve years, I’ve been unable to locate any mention of her death in the Phoenix area newspapers so far. However, I did find an obituary for Lummie in her home town, Erwin, Tennessee.

Published in The Erwin Record, it was dated July 13, 1962—six days before Arizona had recorded her passing (for which I can’t help but recall the statement attributed to Mark Twain, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”).

To resolve such a records dilemma, don’t think it will help to resort to the cemetery’s grave marker. Apparently—at least according to the volunteer transcriber—engraved in stone is the year, 1967. It will either take a trip to Erwin—or the good graces of a Find A Grave volunteer—to stop by Evergreen Cemetery to brush away the camouflaging wisps of Bermuda grass disguising that last digit in the engraving.

Somehow, local researchers in the Erwin area managed to unearth a date which agrees with the one I had always understood to be Lummie's date of death. According to the book, Cemeteries of Unicoi County Tennessee, by the Unicoi County Historical Society, it was on July 9, 1962, that the Moore and Davis families lost a mother, grandmother, and sister.

Perhaps it was in all the scramble to pack and move their belongings from Roanoke, Virginia, back to their old home in Columbus, Ohio—and then, suddenly, to have to return to the old Davis home in Tennessee, that was the cause of these two letters being tucked away by Lummie's brother and sister-in-law, Jack and Ruth Davis. And, for the next fifty one and a half years, to lay undisturbed in their hideout until another passing passed along the whole passel of papers to me.

Mrs. Lummie Davis Moore, formerly of Erwin, died unexpectedly Thursday in Phoenix, Ariz. Death was attributed to a heart attack. Funeral services will be held today (Wednesday) at 10 a.m. from the Boyd-DeArmond Funeral Home. Dr. Melvin Faulkner, pastor of First Baptist Church, will officiate. She was an Erwin native, the daughter of the late William and Cassie Booth Davis. She was the widow of Wallace Moore, who died in 1952. She had lived in Honduras, Central America, for the past 12 years. She was a member of the Women's Club and the Harmony Club in Phoenix. She was also a member of the Baptist Church. Surviving are one daughter, Mrs. C. J. McKinnon of Ellicott City, Md.; one sister, Mrs. Horace Martin, Erwin, and three grandchildren. Boyd-DeArmond Funeral Home in charge.

Wonderful Break

How is it that the mundane—which on first inclination we'd tend to throw away—often turns out to contain, buried, the very clue we are seeking in our research?

Continuing a letter written in the midst of a hospitalization in May, 1962, from retired teacher, Lummie Davis Moore, to her baby brother (in his adult life, known as Jack R. Davis), we can glean quite a few details of her life. From the introduction posted yesterday, it is clear that Lummie had lots of friends and expected to be out and about, lively and engaged in a full life—that, despite her age approaching seventy six years by this point.

In the midst of all the medical—and potential lawsuit—details, the second page of this letter was surprisingly stocked with all sorts of positive comments on how “wonderful” everyone was in treating Lummie.

Best of all for me, though: in the midst of the letter, Lummie slipped in the very detail I had been seeking. There it was, though just a fragment of a sentence awash in a sea of words: a mention of her daughter, Sarah Martha Moore McKinnon. Now that I’ve found that little snippet, oh, how I wish Lummie had included a full date on the letter.

As she, herself, said, though, I suppose “it didn’t make any difference.” Somewhere, though still unnamed, there is a McKinnon daughter whom I can now claim as a new second cousin—whether or not I ever get to meet her.

I will never forget when Dr. McWilliams (after x ray was hurriedly made) come along side of stretcher introduced me to the Surgeon Dr. Tuverson + said Well it’s a fracture alright and we are taking you into surgery just as quickly as we can get you ready. It will be about 7 this evening—we will have to call your family—Who do you have? I protested over having them call Sarah Martha because that day she brought home from Baltimore hospital her new baby girl. But it didn’t make any difference. They called her any way. Lots of friends were with me and between 10 and eleven I was in my room and it was all over—In the meantime I had one of my friends call my lawyer Mr. Divelbess—and I was in hospital there for a couple of weeks with 4 doctors and Jack they + the hospital, together with friends, have been wonderful, simply the “Red Carpet Treatment.” Then they transferred me to this hospital for therapy + rehabilitation, and it’s simply wonderful here, nurses everywhere you look, wonder[ful] food and everything—Private Room here—friends bring me everything. 104 get well cards so far—

Reading Between the Family Lines

Well, if it isn’t to be a Kodak moment that reveals what my grand-aunt Lummie Davis Moore was like, I can’t very well rely on “the next best thing to being there.” Long distance telephone calls—at least in Lummie’s time—were reserved strictly for important business or family emergencies.

Besides, when it comes to preserving family history, phone calls are almost as ephemeral as emails or texting—the next generation’s challenge in piecing together their family stories.

Back in Lummie’s day, however, something better was there to gift future generations with a way to snoop around and read between the lines of their ancestors’ lives: letters.

In the cache of Davis family stuff I’ve recently inherited from my aunt, I was fortunate to find a couple letters from Lummie. Granted, they date from the far end of her life—long past the adventures of her earlier adult years when, as a teacher, she traveled to Honduras.

One particular letter to my grandfather, Lummie’s baby brother, during his brief attempt at retirement in Roanoke, Virginia, was written during a hospital stay. Filled with the mundane details of surgery and recuperation, the letter still managed to reveal quite a bit about Lummie’s personality, expectations, and manner of life.

And, for one brief but shining sentence, the letter revealed a snippet of clues about Lummie's daughter, Sarah Martha Moore McKinnon, my mother’s mystery cousin whom I’m currently seeking.

Since the letter runs long—people had a lot to say back then, but had to save it for the next installment of a serial correspondence—I’ll break it into daily sections, starting with this brief introduction. Lummie, now widowed for the past decade, was at this point living alone in Phoenix, Arizona. The letter was written sometime in May, 1962, although she simply dates it, “Thursday.”

                                                                           Thursday

Dear Jack + Ruth—I am certainly laid low this time—I was at Desert Hills Hotel to a Bridge luncheon + just when I was leaving I slipped on some water left on asphalt floor by swimmers from pool near by—I fractured my right hip and wrenched the joint. The hotel people were wonderful. Called an ambulance. Some of my friends called Dr. McWilliams, my Dr. I was taken to St. Joseph Hospital. Dr. McWilliams was waiting with a bone surgeon, nurses and a whole slew of Drs. My private room reserved. I [was] placed right on operation table…

Seeking Cyril

When confronted with a genealogical brick wall, sometimes the best policy is to do an end run around it.

That was my strategy when I got stuck at the point of researching my mother’s cousin, Sarah Martha Moore McKinnon. Though my mother had hoped that if I applied my research skills to finding her favorite cousin, she could reunite with her, my hopes were dashed the minute I found Sarah Martha listed in the Social Security Death Index.

Well, that is, at least I thought I had found her. What if it was someone else? After all, the record only showed her name as Sarah M. McKinnon. As I’ve already discovered, there are several Sarah McKinnons out there.

On to my next strategy: find Sarah Martha’s husband’s records.

That, as we’ve already discussed, was not an easy proposition when I first started out. All I had, at the beginning, was my southern-lady grandmother’s address book with its proper heading for the family: “Mr. and Mrs. C. J. McKinnon” in Columbia, Maryland.

It was the passenger list which I mentioned yesterday, originally found at Ancestry.com, that jump-started my search for the man. Now I knew his full name was Cyril John McKinnon. And it was a good thing that Passengers Agent included his middle name in the document. Believe it or not, there are also several Cyril McKinnons out there, including a widely-known priest and college professor.

As for Cyril John McKinnon, though, I did locate a couple census records which seem to fit the birth date provided in the Social Security Death Index record.

In the 1930 census, there was an eleven year old Cyril living in the household of John and Kathleen McKinnon of Detroit, Michigan. As had been indicated on the 1953 passenger list I mentioned yesterday, Cyril had been born in England, and this 1930 census record bore that out, while his father, younger brother and sister were listed as born in Canada. Interestingly, his mother declared her birthplace to be Madagascar.

A 1940 census record for the same location presented the same family constellation—parents John and Kathleen, siblings Archibald and Joan—each one roughly ten years older that in the 1930 census.

More exciting was to find a few Ancestry.com members who had posted their family trees, including a mention of Cyril John McKinnon, with the same dates I had found online—though with no mention of a wife or children.

That sort of discovery only compounds my doubt that I’ve found the right person. It makes me wonder whether I need to revise my strategy to do an end run around the end run I’ve done around Sarah Martha, my original brick wall. If I’ve yet to find a burial record or even an obituary for Sarah Martha or her husband, Cyril John McKinnon, would it be possible to find one for Cyril’s brother Archibald or sister Joan? And if I did find one, would it include any mention of Cyril as a surviving sibling—and provide mention of his current residence?

One difficult point in this chase is knowing that Sarah Martha and Cyril had children—but because my mother had lost touch with Sarah Martha’s family, I have no idea what those children’s names might be. Hauntingly, within my aunt’s possessions that I’ve inherited, I’ve found school pictures of three children whom I think might be Sarah Martha’s children—but I can’t know for sure, because I can’t find enough records of the family to check.

Could it be possible that finding relatives from far-removed generations would be easier than finding close kin from our own parents’ generation? It certainly seems so, at least in this case.


Above right: Sketch, "Attack on the Walls of a Besieged Tower," included in the book by Charles Knight, Old England: A Pictorial Museum, published in 1845; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.
  

Sarah Martha Sails Again

If you can’t find a missing distant cousin one way, try another.

In the case of my mother’s cousin, Sarah Martha Moore McKinnon, it turns out the best way to find out about her is via ship’s passenger lists. After all, for a child born to parents working abroad for many years, at some point, the family will want to bring her home to show off to adoring grandparents.

Thanks to the many transcribed records and digitized documents that can now be found on both FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com, I’ve been able to piece together almost a yearly itinerary of the young Sarah Martha.

What’s interesting about this discovery has been reading between the lines on the passenger lists, themselves. I think I can better pinpoint which railroad—or at least what specific purpose—employed Sarah Martha’s father, Wallace Moore. Keeping in mind that my own grandfather traveled down to Honduras in his youth and did some work for that same railroad company, it helps me sketch out a bit more about his own early years.

The trips home began early in Sarah Martha’s life. By now, I’ve obtained indications that Sarah Martha was born in her parents’ home state, Tennessee, rather than in another country. While I don’t know how soon after that event the Moore family took up their position in Honduras, I can at least calculate their arrival there before 1930.

Why? First of all, I can’t locate them in the 1930 United States census.

A more usable clue, though, is the passenger list for the S. S. Atenas, arriving in New Orleans on July 4, 1930. There on the list was three year old Sarah Martha Moore, evidently returning to the States from Puerto Cortes, Honduras, with her paternal grandmother, Sarah Good Moore. Above the marking for the ship name on the document was typewritten the words, “United Fruit Co.”

The next year, Sarah Martha again returned from Honduras to the States—this time arriving in New York City—on the S. S. Musa, a ship on which she would travel at least two other times. Why she would be headed for New York City instead of her parents’ native Tennessee is a question for me to pursue. Sarah Martha was traveling this time with her mother Lummie Davis Moore, who by this time had a sister living in Baltimore. Perhaps this arrangement was to accommodate a family visit on the East Coast.

Yet again in 1933, Sarah Martha and Lummie took the same route and ship, arriving in the port of New York on July 13. By this time, Sarah Martha was six years of age. Traveling with them from Honduras, apparently, were the two young Zapata children, born in New York City with their address given as “c/o Honduran Consulate.”

Once again on the S.S. Musa on June 28, 1934, mother and daughter arrived in New York City. Even so, Lummie gave as their home address, “224 Main St., Erwin, Tenn.” I can’t help but think that the route to New Orleans would have been a more direct way to get home to Tennessee from Honduras—and wonder what other reason there might have been for the two to head, instead, to New York.

By the time Sarah Martha was twelve, her New York-bound itinerary was most likely due to her destination: a city-area boarding school. At least, that is what my mother had told me about Sarah Martha’s childhood years. Arriving at the end of August, 1939—this time on the S. S. Pastores—Sarah Martha and her mother would have arrived just in time for the start of the school year.

An interesting footnote to this ship’s record is found at the bottom of the digitized page:

            Line:                United Fruit Co.

            Owners:           United Fruit Steamship Corp.

            Local Agents:   United Fruit Co.

Yet, the next year, sailing this time from Tela, Honduras, aboard the S. S. Sixaola, Sarah Martha and her mother, Lummie, arrived back in New Orleans, rather than in New York. They arrived on September 5, 1940—quite late for the starting date of the school year. Could they have reverted to the old itinerary in fears of risky sailing conditions now on the Atlantic?

I love finding the last travel record. This time, Sarah Martha was listed under her married name, Sarah Martha McKinnon. She and her husband arrived in New York City on April 20, 1953, on the S. S. Esparta, operated under the auspices of the Tela Railroad Company—the railroad linked with the United Fruit Company of those many previous journeys home taken by Sarah Martha and her mother.

In addition to finding the link to the specific railroad company the family was employed by, what is valuable about this passenger listing is that it transformed the proper yet enigmatic “Mr. C. J. McKinnon” of my grandmother’s address book into a man with an actual name. This was the document that confirmed for me the significance of those two frustrating initials, C. J. At long last, I could finally document his name as Cyril John McKinnon.

Above: Honduras Rail Map of 1925, from W. Rodney Long, Railways of Central America and the West Indies, published by the United States Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., in 1925; map on page 54; original held by the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana with digitized version courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library via Wikipedia; in the public domain.

The Process of Discovery

Researching family history leads to an ever-unfolding revelation.

For one thing, more records are being converted to digital files and added to various online resources every day. What couldn’t be found yesterday has a better chance of being found today—and an even greater possibility of being discovered in the weeks to come.

In addition, the more we know, the more we are equipped to find additional facts. Each detail drops into place like a missing piece of the puzzle, clarifying most-likely next steps to nudge into place.

However, sometimes those revelations are not so much Ah ha! moments as Oops recoveries. Going back over what we’ve already entered in our databases, we may find details entered in error—or provided by documents themselves riddled with mistakes (yes, even death certificates). And we may uncover spots in our records that had been left blank. The last time we passed that way, we just weren’t prepared to enter some data, whether because of lack of supply, or because of sheer doubt of our source.

Since embarking on a revisit of my records for my mother’s cousin, Sarah Martha Moore McKinnon—whom I introduced to you when I stumbled upon her childhood picture a couple days ago—I’ve realized I needed to do some housecleaning of her data.

I was particularly in need of her birth and marriage information. While I had most likely gleaned the April 3, 1927, birth date from an entry in the Davis family Bible, I hadn’t been able to uncover any other documentation of that date, especially any that indicated the location of that birth. One could easily assume she would have been born in Tennessee, where her parents were raised. Knowing her immediate family’s propensity to travel—and live—in Central America, though, I couldn’t be sure she was American-born.

Between those blanks in my records, and my unprepared launching into a blog post on her part of our extended family, I was brought back to the fact that I was missing some details and documentation on this one family member’s entry.

So what can a winter-bound family history researcher do on a cold post-Christmas day? Scour the Internet to see what can be found!

Of course, as often happens, while I was looking this way, what should show up from that way in my search? Trying desperately (as I have for years, now) to discover any more on Sarah Martha’s husband, the mysterious Mr. C. J. McKinnon as my grandmother always addressed him, I happened to bump into a birth entry for Sarah Martha, herself.

Undaunted by the fact that the date was one day off from records gleaned from our family Bible (chalk that up to a source listed as an index of material), Tennessee Births and Christenings, 1828-1939 did at least confirm that she was born in Tennessee, not Honduras or any equally exotic (and inaccessible for records) location.

And that date being a matter of one day’s discrepancy from my previous notes was no problem. As it turns out, thanks to both FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com (for those willing to subscribe to obtain the privilege of accessing their records), I was able to find quite a few travel records showing Sarah Martha’s yearly return trips to the States to attend boarding school while her parents remained in Honduras. Thankfully, of those passenger lists that included a birth date, the April third date I originally obtained was amply vindicated.

So much for governmental records. Or the indexes thereof.

A Photograph’s Journey

Don’t you just love it when, flipping through old family photographs, a sweet face stares back at you and captures your heart?

For the last several days, I’ve been stymied with the rush of all the family pictures I’ve suddenly inherited. Blame it on holiday obligations or a lingering cold that befuddles my mind, but I’m stuck under an avalanche of glossies. I have no clue where to begin to sort this collection into anything that would make sense to the proverbial innocent bystander.

I’d like to set out to document my findings in a logical progression—something along the lines of branches in the family tree—but I can’t even find enough room to claim as working space to sort and label the mess.

So I keep flipping through pockets of pictures tucked away in envelopes, old wallets—everything but labeled albums—wondering where to begin.

And then this cherubic face looks up at me and nearly begs, “Start here.”

So, as usual, I find myself, once again, starting from the middle.

Here, in the middle of my aunt’s collection of family keepsakes, is a photo of a young child. My guess is that the picture was snapped by her mother, who penned on the reverse, “I love her in this picture made in the back lawn.”

I’m presuming the rest of the story about the journey this picture took from there to here involved mailing it to the photographer’s own mother. Thankfully, that grandmother had enough sense to label the picture with the grandchild’s name, for in a different hand and color of ink, the words were inserted, “Sarah Martha Moore.”

I wonder if the rest of the journey for this picture involved this grandmother’s son inheriting the woman’s personal effects, including this photograph. He, in turn, left it up to his wife to organize and dispose of the collection as she saw fit. His wife, apparently, chose to keep the photo, but upon her passing, the whole collection became the property of her daughter.

That daughter would be my aunt.

And now, I have the photograph of Sarah Martha, from Ruth McClellan Davis’ husband’s mother, Martha Cassandra Boothe Davis, who received it in a note from her daughter Lummie Davis Moore, mother of the young Sarah Martha. And I'm so grateful someone decided to label the picture.

Isn’t your head spinning? That’s why genealogists employ databases to keep this stuff straight.

Thinking about Sarah Martha always makes me sad. Not because of Sarah Martha, herself—I never met this cousin-once-removed. But I’ve heard her name so many times. She was my mother’s favorite cousin on her paternal side.

Back in the early 1990s, when I rebooted my pursuit of family history, I had been discussing all the now-available resources I had found online in my customary phone calls back east to my mother. My mom had perked up at the notion that people with whom she had lost contact might still be accessible through online searches.

“Can you see whatever happened to Sarah Martha?” she asked me. Certain that I could, I promised her I would make that a priority.

Sadly, not more than a few months later, I ran across an item indicating that Sarah Martha—or at least someone who, strangely, had managed to have the exact same name—had passed away.

All the data was right. By this time I had inherited my grandmother’s little address book, showing “Mr. and Mrs. C. J. McKinnon”—Sarah Martha’s married name, according to that prim and proper Southern style of address—living in a Baltimore suburb right by the place where this Sarah Martha had died.

Any genealogist, however, knows it’s not really over until the fat lady sends that confirming copy of the death certificate, so I didn’t want to say anything to my mom until I could determine that I had the right person. Sending for a copy of that cert, however, is not an easy thing in the state of Maryland unless you are the direct descendant of the deceased. I, of course, was not.

I thought I’d try a different route: obituaries. Even with the help of the friendly librarian at the city’s main library, none could be located.

Cemetery? I was clueless where to look. I gave it my best try, but no results in the Baltimore area.

I even tried looking up others with the same surname in the suburb, writing those “please-excuse-me-for-the-intrusion” letters in hopes that one would find its way to the right family. After all, those would possibly be second cousins I’d be connecting with, if any answered. No response.

The more daunting approach was to guess what those prim-and-proper Southern-style initials might represent for Sarah Martha’s husband. Perhaps he had an obituary published which could lead me to any descendants. I remember sitting down at the computer one long evening and starting a search, trying for possibilities every man’s name beginning with the letter “C.”

I gave up long before the middle of the alphabet. And that’s a good thing, as I realized when I later found the likely candidate for those initials to be “Cyril John.”

It’s been nearly twenty years since I had to tell my mom that, best I could tell, she would no longer be able to enjoy a later-life reunion with her beloved cousin. In those many years, I’ve thought, wistfully, about Sarah Martha many times. What an interesting life she must have led, being the only daughter of a teacher who married an older railroad executive with the caveat that the deal that began with “I do” included a life lived in exotic locations in far-away Central America. What a wonderful wrap to such a life's story to find a way to reunite two cousins.

I can find, thanks to documents available at Ancestry.com, records of Sarah Martha's earlier travels back to the States to visit family or to return to the boarding school she attended in her later childhood. Oh, how I wished I could have made that personal connection, though. Sometimes, it’s nice to use those genealogical research skills to find those of our family we are seeking among the living.