Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It’s Saturday Night again –
Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.
1) Do you have ancestors who suffered the loss of one or both parents early in their life? Did the surviving parent remarry soon after one parent died? Was a guardian appointed for your ancestor to protect their physical or legal interests?
2) Tell us about one or two of your “orphaned” ancestors and how this affected their life.
To begin to answer these questions, I first had to figure out which ancestors lost a parent while young. I limited my search to grandparents thru third grandparents.
- Grandmother, Winnie Leatha Currey was 10 when her mother died
- Great grandfather, Edward G. Briles, was 10 when his father died
- Great great grandfather, Hiram M. Currey, was 7 when his mother died
- Great great grandfather, Hiram M. Currey, was likely 14 when his father disappeared from records
- Great great grandmother, Angelina Burke, was 9 when her father died
- Great great grandfather, Albert Hutchinson, was 1 when his father died
- Great great grandfather, Albert Hutchinson, was 9 when his mother died
- Great great grandmother, Julia Harding, was 6 when her mother died
- Great great grandfather, George Mentzer, was 7 when his father died
- Great great grandfather, Thurston Wells, was 11 when his father died
- Great great grandmother, Salome Crandall was 10 when her mother died
- Great great grandmother, Salome Crandall was 16 when her father died
To quickly determine whether I had any guardianship records for these ancestors, I did a ‘Find Everywhere’ search in my RootsMagic file for the word Guardian.
While that search revealed probate records appointing guardians for the minor children of Lewis Crandall, Salome Crandall was 20 at the time. Thus, she is not named in those records.
The ‘Find Everywhere’ search did uncover a record identifying the guardian of George Mentzer. This record was for the 1849 sale of land by George’s older brother, Cyrus. In the deed, Cyrus is identified as the guardian of George Mentzer. While I have the sale of the land as an event in George Mentzer’s timeline, I do not have a guardian fact. Thus, without the Find Everywhere search, I would not have quickly found this information.
The death of a parent affected my ancestors in a variety of ways.
- Edward Briles’ mother, Sarah, raised her two children on her own. She did have support of her husbands family since they lived near her father-in-law and brothers-in-law.
- Albert Hutchinson, who lost both of his parents before the age of 10, is shown in the 1850 census in the household of his great-aunt, Cynthia Finch.
- Hiram Currey, who lost both of his parents before the age of 15, is shown in the 1850 census in the household of his widowed aunt, Jane Currey.
For my grandmother, the loss of her mother at the age of 10 had a huge impact on her and her siblings. Because her father did not feel capable of caring for his young family, the family was split up. The two youngest, Earnest aged 7 and Alma aged 1, were placed with other families. According to my grandmother, Winnie Currey, she and her two older sisters, Mary and Myrtle, were placed in a children’s home. Fortunately, the family was able to reconnect as adults. My blog post, Orphaned in the City, shows my quest to document these stories of my grandmother.
Thank you Randy for this challenge!