The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-And-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors (7 page)

In this case, the family's births were registered in the Record of Negroes and Mulattoes, Randolph County, Illinois, Family History Library film 975014.

Figure 2-5
Application for administration concerning Elizabeth Barnes estate.

The following list contains the names and ages of the family of Mumford Jones, a colored person, residing near Edin in the County of Randolph and State of Illinois.

Depositions in court cases for civil or criminal actions will often begin with the individual identifying himself and giving his age.

In order to qualify for various veteran benefits and pensions, the applicant often gave his own birth date, the date of his marriage, and, for Civil War pensions, a list of births and deaths for each of his children.
The later the time period of the benefit, the more vital information you are likely to find.
If an individual or his widow was receiving a pension there should be a date for when that person was dropped from the rolls, and often the exact date of death appears (see
Figure 2-8
).

Figure 2-6

Circuit court minutes providing the death date of James H. McBride.

Figure 2-7

Circuit court minutes providing the death date of James H. McBride's two wives.

If the benefit application doesn't supply the date you need, another source you can check is the Final Payment files, a chronological list of payments made by the government. A card index is available. The microfilm is NARA's T7-18 (23 rolls), entitled “Ledgers of Payments 1818–1871 to U.S. Pensioners Under Acts of 1818 through 1858, From Records of the Office of the Third Auditor of the Treasury.” At the Family History Library, these records are available on rolls 1319381 and 1319403.

Don't forget to check the mortality schedules for the years preceding the censuses of 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880. The census takers were told to report the deaths that occurred in the community within the previous twelve months. Although these lists are not complete, they provide valuable information if your ancestor is named. The mortality schedule was the only record we could find for the death of my husband's aged third great-grandfather (see
Figure 2-9
).

A few states were encouraged to conduct a special state census in 1885 with the promise of partial reimbursement from the federal government. The states that conducted this census are listed in the table that follows.

Figure 2-8
Department of the interior record of Marion Morrison's Civil War pension being dropped due to her death.

Schedule 5 of this series (see
Figure 2-9
) was a mortality schedule and included name, age, sex, color, place of birth, parents' place of birth, occupation, and cause of death for every person who died within the year ending 31 May 1885. You must know the state and community of your ancestor to determine whether special censuses were conducted there, and if so, what items were listed. For instance, New York did not begin to keep statewide marriage registration until 1880, but the 1865 and 1875 state censuses contain the names and dates of marriages recorded in the previous year.

In Kentucky, school censuses were taken in 1888. Not all have survived, but those that did contain birth dates for the children attending the school. Local variations like this do occur and it is important to watch for them.

Figure 2-9
Mortality schedule proving the death of George Morgan.

The exact date of marriage can often be found within the divorce record. Obviously, that there was a divorce is direct evidence that a marriage occurred. Divorce records can be located in county court minutes or in private legislative acts. Table 3-1 of
The Source
(first edition), pages 86-88, gives the divorce courts for each state and suggestions for locating the records. Divorces, of course, were also reported in newspapers — especially if the spouse had absconded to places unknown, which was typical. The
Vermont Gazette
(Bennington, Vermont) reported the exact date of marriage in this divorce announcement:

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, and before that period outside of New England, few exact references to births, deaths, and marriages exist. Instead, the researcher must use inferences, approximations, a process of elimination, and a thorough knowledge of human behavior — as well as an understanding of the legal and social customs of the time period — to arrive at a reasonable estimation of the needed date.

1.
Count backward from the time of the first marriage or the birth of the first child to get an approximate age for both parents. A good rule of thumb is eighteen to twenty-three years for a female's first marriage and twenty-three to twenty-eight years for a male's first marriage — allowing a few years for a margin of error. Rural residents and those of lower socioeconomic class tended to marry and begin their families earlier than townsmen and those of higher economic class. Enthusiasm and inadequate birth control almost always produced the first child within two to three years. One must remember that the first child may not survive, and that there is always the possibility of the lusty eight-and-a-half-pound “premature” baby who arrives only four months after the marriage. Wise researchers always keep in mind that they are working with human beings, who had the same interests, faults, proclivities, and needs as human beings do today.

2.
The age at which a woman stops having children may also be a clue to when she was born. It is extremely unusual for a woman to have children after the age of forty-five. When a woman has a number of children and then stops for a period, then suddenly another child appears, at least three possibilities must be considered.

a.
She is taking care of a grandchild (possibly one of those lusty premature babies mentioned earlier) or a relative's child that she and her husband may have adopted.

b.
She has had a menopausal baby. If so, keep alert to see if that child is “void of intelligence,” “defective,” or “dependent.” There is a much higher likelihood of a child being born with Down's syndrome or other birth defects if the mother is over the age of forty. Also, the likelihood of twins increases if the mother is over forty — particularly if there is not a history of twins in the family. If you find one of these situations to be the case, the child is probably biologically hers rather than a relative's.

c.
She is a second wife with the same given name as the first wife, and is thus much younger than you think. You may encounter this situation more frequently before 1850, when women are often difficult to locate in the records. A good clue is a significant passage of time in which her name does not appear in the records. Or the opposite may occur. If you are “leapfrogging” across decades and primarily using the census to document your family, ten years is more than enough time for a woman to die in childbirth and a man to remarry and produce additional children. I have speculated that men marry wives of the same name to avoid embarrassing mistakes during moments of intimacy. James M. Beall of Russellville, Logan County, Kentucky, was more cautious than most. He erected a gravestone there in memory of his three wives, all named Sarah.

3.
The legal age of consent is important when estimating a date of birth. It is important to know the laws of the community for the period. When could one buy and sell land? Usually individuals couldn't sell land until age twenty-one, although they could acquire it at an earlier age. When did the law allow the witnessing of deeds, the signing of bonds, the witnessing of wills, the choosing of a guardian? In colonial times in Massachusetts, someone as young as fourteen could witness a deed and choose a guardian. In many states and colonies, if a guardian was chosen for the children, they were under fourteen. If the children came into court and chose their own guardian, they were fourteen or over. Sometimes the court minutes reflect a child's dissatisfaction with the manner in which the estate was handled, or he may have wished to exercise the authority of maturing years, so he would ask for a change of guardian as soon as he reached the age of fourteen. If the court minutes are complete, we can also find when the children reached maturity (usually eighteen for girls and twenty-one for boys), as they usually dismissed their guardian and signed a receipt for whatever was left of the estate. A desire to reach maturity and control the money prompted many a dependent child to release and relinquish his guardian very soon after reaching the age of consent.

Following is an example of how estimations can be made for birth years.
In this case, I had birth dates for only two of the seven children known to have inherited from their father, Moses Foren. The others were estimated from changes of guardianship and marriage dates and all fit well within the known three marriage dates of Moses Foren.