One of the basic guidelines of doing thorough genealogical research is to always work on collateral family lines. That simply means we should not just attempt to go back in a straight line from child to parent to grandparent, etc., but to remember that all our ancestors were part of families, and every sibling is important to our research, whether they had children of their own or not. In fact, sometimes the childless members of our families provide us with the exact information we need to break down our stubborn brick walls. This is one of the four topics our guest speaker, D. Joshua Taylor, will present at the StLGS Fall Speaker Series, Saturday, 1 October 2022, and we have stories from our own genealogical research to share.
Let’s look closely at two examples of childless family members whose paper trail led to solving mysteries, one in fairly recent times, the other one hundred years earlier.
Allen Walker Murray was born in 1884 and married Bertha Kelling in 1907. He and Bertha had a fairly nomadic life until they settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sometime around 1920. For reasons unknown to anyone in the family, Allen turned himself into a new person called John E. Lowe in Pittsburgh. He was a car salesman and then a Lincoln car dealer with his own business, the Lowe Motor Company. He died unexpectedly at the age of forty-six in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, leaving no children. His widow returned to St. Louis, where she died in St. Louis in 1980 at the age of ninety-nine.
The Murray family stayed close to Bertha when she came back to St. Louis, but she would never talk about her life with Allen/John. Every bit of her life with him remained a secret, including details about his untimely death and where he was buried. It was only when his nephew obtained a death certificate from Pennsylvania that the specifics of John's life began to emerge, and even those took time to unravel. The death certificate showed "accidental" death by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. Years later, thanks to the explosion of information on the internet, the truth finally was revealed. John was involved in some dodgy financial transactions. He had been "borrowing" from his company, which, at the time of his death, was in deep debt. However, he did have a life insurance policy with Bertha as beneficiary, and, of course, that policy would be void if his death was a suicide. We will never know how his cause of death was ruled "accidental," but the money from the insurance policy enabled Bertha to live to a comfortable old age and to leave a modest inheritance for every one of her husband's fourteen nieces and nephews who had no idea how they came to receive that unexpected check in the mail.
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Now we will go back one hundred years to the Haight family—to the third-great-grandmother of our publicity and social media director, Laura Mackinson. Laura says her fourth-great-grandfather, Aaron Haight (1806–1867), had a daughter Sarah Ann “Sally Ann” who married John Hill in 1849. Since 1850 was the first year the U.S. census listed all family members by name, Sally Ann never appears by name on a census when living with her birth family. Laura says, “Aaron was one of thirteen children to reach adulthood, and the 1879 real estate/probate record from John Haight (Aaron’s younger brother) listed all the living siblings and heirs of the deceased siblings because John had no issue. Aaron died in a work-related accident and left no will or estate.”
Des Moines County, Iowa, “Administrator’s Report of Real Estate, and List of Heirs,” John Haight, File B-111, 22 March 1879; District Court, Burlington; database with images, “Iowa Wills and Probate Records, 1758–1997,” Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com : accessed 30 January 2016), citing Probate Packets, 1st Series, 1835–1906, Gross, Peter-Hale, Gardner.
Learn more about this interesting topic at our Fall Speaker Series!
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