The first is my mother's grandfather on her father's side. Granddad always told us that he was raised in an orphanage in Utah. He knew his mother and father's names but had never met them. I have been able to track down the mother and her family all the way back to the Revolutionary War but have gotten ZERO on his father.
Granddad always said that his father's name was Harry Nash and that he was from Detroit, Michigan. On the other hand, Granddad's sister, Sedelia, always said that their father was from Ohio. At any rate, Harry Nash continues to elude me.
My other prominent failure relates to James Oliver Alexander, my great grandfather on Dad's side. Coincidentally, one of my greatest "Aha!" moments also relates to him. Let me describe it first.
J.O.'s wife was an mystery, like a ghost in the wind. Finally one day, I was examining a photo of Granddad, their child, and noticed that the photographer was located in Bentonville, Arkansas, a place I had never associated with J.O. I began to dig into Bentonville and discovered my great grandmother, Malinda, was buried there, about a block from Wal Mar's World Headquarters!
My failure which relates to J.O. is where he was for the twenty years between Malinda's death in 1871 and when he resurfaced in Childress, Texas in the late 1880's. Oh well, I'll keep plugging away and someday I will find out where he was.
This picture is of J.O. and his brother, John Walker Alexander. It is interesting to note that these two brothers fought on opposite sides during the Civil War. J.O. fought for the Confederacy in Texas and John Walker fought for the Union in Missouri.
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One more thing which is interesting from a genealogy point of view is the loss of the 1890 census records. Census records are a vital part of genealogy and are the "backbone" of most family trees. However, the 1890 census records don't exist.
These records were stored in a warehouse in St. Louis. In 1921, a fire swept through that warehouse and destroyed all but a few thousand of the census records. I can't tell you how many times I have looked at someone's history and wished I knew where they were in 1890. Oh, well!
Edd, it sure sounds like you have more successes than failures. And, like you, if I had a dime for every time I thought, "if I could just see that 1890 census", I'd be a rich man. Our big mystery surrounds my grandfather, who always said he ran away from home at age 12 and never returned. He was born in 1887, which means he left probably about 1899. The ONLY census he would have been in with his parents is the one we can't see. Frustrating...but it keeps the mystery alive, which in reality, is what keeps us genealogy-geeks moving forward.
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