Accenting the Positive

In an old song, we're urged to "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, and don't mess with Mr. In-Between."

 As we approach the year-end period when we traditionally take stock, Jill Ball, blogging as GENIAUS, has posted an annual meme urging us to review the past twelve months of genealogy and "Accent the Positive".  Tip o' the hat to Jennifer Jones, who responded to Jill's challenge in her blog "Tracking Down the Family".  It was through Jennifer's post that I became aware of Jill's meme.

So here are my positives for the year.  One note: I've been experiencing increasing levels of stress over the past several years, from events outside and inside the family.  I'm in therapy.  One part of my therapy I have come up with and applied, as a means of inserting more positive perspectives, is to finally get back to investigating the family histories of myself and my husband, and to revive this poor neglected blog.  In this entry, I have left out many of the items Jill suggests we answer because they don't apply to me.  I've renumbered the remaining ones.

1. On revisiting some old research I found some wonderful information about my grandmother's third husband, and I finally identified her second husband.  Her first husband was my grandfather.

2. I was the recipient of genearosity from my cousin John, who lives near our ancestral stomping ground in Indiana, and who has offered to do research lookups for me.  I plan to take him up on that offer.

3.  I am pleased that I am a member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, in which I was voted membership last year, along with our older daughter.

4. I made a new DNA discovery, that my aunt (my mother's biological sister) had not been accurate when she maintained that their mother was adopted.  DNA shows that my connection to grandmother's family is intact, and that she was not adopted at all.  

 

5.  AI was a mystery to me but I learnt that I can do just about anything better than AI can at this stage of its development.  I am a thoroughgoing skeptic when it comes to AI;  I've read Karel Capek's R.U.R.  With two books under my belt, with glowing reviews for each, I know I am a better writer than any AI or computer genealogy program.  Believe it or not, you are, too.  We humans write our family histories from the heart.  AI has no heart.     

6. The best value I got for my genealogy dollars was the recent sale by the New England Historic Genealogical Society.  They gave good discounts on books about New England genealogy, where my paternal roots lie. 

7. I wouldn't be without this technology: The computer, what else?  And the internet.  I have done genealogy the old-fashioned way, and still do from time to time.  But as I have gotten older, and my options for travel and just getting out and about have become limited, I do appreciate having so much wonderful information available from reliable websites and databases. 

 
9.  Another positive I would like to share is that genealogy is good therapy!  It makes you aware that you are not the only one who has suffered tragedies and hard times.  It assures us that we, too, can survive these times.  Seeing the thread of life down through the decades, and for some of us, the centuries, puts it all in perspective.

 

Throwback Thursday: Small Town Indiana, 1890s

My grandma Mary LeSourd Reed grew up in a small town called Sleeth, Indiana.  It had been named for the family of her mother, Rachel Anna Sleeth, who married Levi Curtis LeSourd in 1868.  Sleeth is not much more than a ghost town today, so I'm told.  It is in Carroll County, northwest of Delphi.  My grandma told me some tales about the area, including her mother's thrift one Sunday ride.  Rachel Anna Sleeth would go on buggy rides with her husband Levi.  They stopped one day at a roadside stand where the farmer was selling corn for 2 cents an ear.  These days, that would be an unheard-of opportunity.  But the ears of corn were snug in their shucks, so Rachel turned up her nose, saying, "Corns not shucked.  Drive on."  In my grandma's family down to my own life, that became a way of saying that something had not met your standards and you were going to keep searching until you found an example that did measure up. 

One feature of small-town life in the late 19th century, all the way up until the mid 20th century was the general store, whether it was located in an Indiana town or one in Georgia, like the general store in Darien, Georgia that my husband's step-grandfather owned.  The photo below is of the I. G. Wilson General Store, which may have been in Sleeth, but I don't remember what grandma told me about it.  I also don't know the meaning of "Lest We Forget" written in pen at the bottom of the photo.  Grandma told me that, among the children, I. G. was not well-liked, and the children would taunt him with, "I. G. Wilson.  Nut! Nut! Nut! Nut! Nut!" 

     

 A Tale of Three Siblings

My mother, Martha Reed, was, like me, the youngest of three.  She was born in 1916, her sister Margaret in 1914, and her brother Donald in 1913.  Their father, Benjamin Franklin Reed, died in a railroad accident in 1917, just two months before my mother's first birthday.  Mom and Aunt Margaret were taken away from their mother, Ruth Ella Nave, by the Reed family and adopted within the family.  Aunt Margaret described it to me as the Reeds having "ganged up on" Ruth Nave and taken the two girls away.  Mom was adopted by the oldest brother, Perry Wilmer Reed, and his wife Mary LeSourd.  Aunt Margaret was adopted by Don Francis Reed and his wife, Grace McElroy.  Mom's brother Donald remained with his mother.

 

Somehow, probably through family connections, the three siblings stayed in touch, and in their middle years, all ended up in Florida.  Uncle Donald was in the Tampa Bay area.  Aunt Margaret was in Orlando.  Mom was in Jacksonville.

 

The photo on top, below, shows my grandmother Ruth Nave with Donald and Margaret, about 1920.  Mom had already been picked up by Perry and Mary Reed, who lived in Pensacola, Florida.  The photo on the bottom is the siblings reunited in the 1950s, in Florida.

 

Ruth Nave with Donald and Margaret, abt. 1920

Martha Reed, Donald Reed, Margaret Reed abt. 1955

     

Close as Family

One topic in genealogy today is the FAN network.  For those who haven't run into this, FAN stands for Friends, Associates, and Neighbors.  It is a way to use the investigation of close friends, co-workers and other associates, and neighbors to possibly find clues to one's own ancestors' activities.  Sometimes it is worth the time, and sometimes it's not.

I have not done a great deal of this sort of research myself, but I have ideas as to who might bear looking at.  One of my father's Naval Academy classmates is one possibility.  Though he and his wife have since passed on, I remember my mother talking about this fellow and his wife as having been very close friends with her and my father.  I think it was the summer after my freshman year in college that my mom and I drove up to Norfolk, Virginia, to visit them.  I'm not sure what looking into this man would possibly reveal about my father, but there could be a clue there somewhere.

When we moved from California to Florida after my father died, my mother developed a close friendship with a couple who lived nearby.  Later, they moved out to the northern end of another county.  It was a drive, but we went out there often.  Again, I'm not sure what research into this couple might reveal about my mother, but there may be clues there, too.  

This couple who were such good friends with my mother served as adjunct aunt and uncle to me.  They joked with me.  They called me "Monster," which led me to call them "Mr. Monster" and "Mrs. Monster."  Their daughters, several years older than I was, served as additional big sisters.  

A group of women with whom I attended Florida State University has been held together by a semi-annual newsletter.  One of our number has, for more than fifty years, gathered news from us and published this newsletter.  In it, we have recounted our joys and sorrows, told tales of our families, mention the books we've read, and kept up with each other.  That newsletter has a good deal of information about me in it, that my daughters and grandson might possibly find interesting.

A FAN network may bridge generations.  Some of our daughters' friends have become close as family not only to them, but to me and my husband, as well.  And the parents of these friends of our daughters have also entered our FAN network.  The four of us have also latched onto two sisters who live locally, with none of their family anywhere near them.  Their parents have passed on, and their sister lives in Massachusetts.  These sisters spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with us, as well as always being invited to share in other family celebrations.

If nothing else, ferreting out your parents' or grandparents' FAN networks may provide a good look at the social world in which your ancestors lived.  Understanding background is a big help to understanding your ancestors.

     

The Search for William W. Pennington

After my mother died, I wanted to try to get more information on my grandmother Ruth Nave.  Her first husband, Benjamin Franklin ("Frank") Reed was my grandfather.  After he died in a railroad accident in 1917, my grandmother married again.  She later had a third husband, Harold White.  To get more information, I visited my aunt Margaret in Orlando.  She told me that she and my mother had been adopted by two of Frank Reed's brothers.  She had been adopted by Don Francis Reed and his wife Grace McElroy.  My mother had been adopted by Perry Wilmer Reed and his wife Mary LeSourd.  Aunt Margaret indicated that the Reeds had not been fond of Ruth Nave, and had "ganged up on her" to take the two younger of her children away from her.  Her oldest child, her son Donald Reed, was 16 years old at the time, and the family left him with his mother.  

My mother never talked about her mother, except once.  After my cousin Dale, Aunt Margaret's daughter, told me when we were both 10 years old that Aunt Margaret and my mother had been adopted, I asked Mom about it.  She tersely informed me that it was true, and her parents' names had been Frank Reed and Ruth Nave.  After my mother died, I found among her papers a copy of her original birth certificate and a copy of the final decree of adoption, which bore out what she had told me.

 When I talked to aunt Margaret during my visit, she told me that Ruth Nave had been married twice more after my grandfather died.  Her second husband had borne the surname Pennington, and her third husband was named Harold White.  I had known this latter fact, having obtained a death certificate of my grandmother in 2006 based on what little information Mom told me when I asked her about her being adopted.  Ruth Nave had died in 1951 in Logansport, Indiana, under the name Ruth White.  The informant on the death certificate was her husband, Harold White.  I found my grandmother's grave at the Mount Hope Cemetery in Logansport.

Earlier this year, after I retired and was finally able to work on my own family history once again, I got curious about my grandmother's second husband.  I have not yet found a marriage certificate for them.  The only other possibility was that he had been buried in the same cemetery where Ruth Nave was buried, Mount Hope.  I went to an independent online index of burials and found, among seven graves under the name of Pennington, only two which predated the year of my grandmother's death, 1951.  One was a woman, and the other was William W. Pennington, who died in 1927 at the age of 29.  I searched for a death certificate, and found the record of the death of William Walter Pennington.  The informant was his wife, Ruth Pennington.  From there, I found a listing in a Logansport city directory for Ruth Pennington, widow of William.  She was living at an address I had previously found for her, which lent credence to her being the informant and William Walter Pennington being her second husband. 

 There is an irony, which I wonder if my grandmother realized.  Both Frank Reed and William Pennington were 29 years old when they died.

     

Country wisdom . . . and humor

From our marriage in 1971 to the first decades of the 21st Century, I was exposed to a milieu with which I was totally unfamiliar.  That was the yearly Thanksgiving gathering of my husband's mother's family on farmland just outside of Darien, Georgia, that had been in the family since before the Civil War.  Their home was a simple dogtrot built about a hundred years before.  Modern conveniences had been added through the years.  For decades, my husband's grandmother had cooked meals for her large family in a tiny galley.  One Christmas, the children all chipped in and gave their mother a gift that kept on giving: they enlarged and modernized the kitchen.  These were country folk, descendants of Scots-Irish settlers of Georgia.  They had a strong sense of family, and it took time both for me to be accepted by them and for me to get used to their ways.  But there were moments when their plain-spoken words made me laugh.

One of those times was when my husband and I and our two daughters, both adults, were sitting on the porch that ran almost the length of one side of the house, in southern tradition, talking about all sorts of things.  One of the things under discussion on that day was a dog my husband's parents had some years before.  She was a Black Apple-Headed Chihuahua named Weejee.  The aunts were on and on about that "nasty little rat dog."  Our daughters defended the little dog's memory.  "We loved Weejee; she was a good dog."  One of the aunts put her view of the relationship between our daughters and the dog in simple terms that had us laughing.  "Of course she was good to you.  You was her grandpuppies!"

      

 "A rascally Tory"

Captain Josiah Edson, born about 1683, married Sarah, daughter of Zaccheus Packard the elder, my seventh great-grandfather.  He was in possession a goodly portion of the estate of his uncle Josiah, for whom he was apparently named.(1)

Captain Josiah and Sarah had seven children:  Sarah (1705), Abiah (1706), Josiah (24 Jan. 1709), Huldah (1713), Abiezer (1715), Freelove (1718), Elijah (1720).

Their son Josiah, known as Colonel Josiah Edson, was "a very distinguished man before the Revolution, Justice of the peace, Deacon of the church, and Col. of the regiment of militia and representative of the town."(2)  But right before Bunker Hill, he slipped a cog and became "a rascally Tory."  He went over to the British, taking refuge in one of their camps.  He was with the British at Long Island, and died there in 1776.  Under an act of the General Court in 1778, Colonel Josiah's lands were confiscated and he became the only person in Bridgewater whose disloyalty caused his lands to be taken under that act, for his having gone over to the enemy side.

He was a black sheep, if ever there was one.  I maintain that it is the black sheep of our families who make our genealogical inquiries interesting, however much we may deplore the behavior that earned them that title. 

(1) Nahum Mitchell, History of the Settlement of  Bridgewater, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, Including an Extensive Family Register.  (Boston: Kidder & Wright, 1840), 152.

(2) Recopied Bridgewater town record, Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988
Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryuicontent/view/10890485:2495?ssrc=pt&tid=12481845&pid=132366600143 (accessed 16 March 2022).  [The quoted entry appears below the list of Captain Josiah's children with Sarah Packard.]     
 

I Joined a Lineage Society Because . . . 

People have all sorts of motives for doing all sorts of things including joining a lineage society.  Last week, on a Facebook page of a group focused on Mayflower descendants, someone asked why those members who had joined lineage societies had done so.  I have to confess, one of my reasons was rather silly, but silly is a positive trait in our family.  When I was a child, references to Mayflower Descendants and the like usually were associated with the "upper crust," the elite, the rich.  My family was anything but.  Later on, in adulthood, I had come across the wonderfully hilarious Anna Russell, whose sendups of opera, both grand and comic, as well as of classical music in general, tickled me no end.  She has one routine where she instructs her audience how to write their own Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.  It centers on the New York City clique during the Gilded Age (the latter part of the 19th Century) known as the Four Hundred.  It starts out with a ditty that begins:

We are the great Four Hundred,

If you want to know who we are.

And we put on airs 'cause our forefathairs,

Came over on the Mayflowah!

And it's veddy, veddy snappy

If your mammy or your pappy

Is descended from the Mayflowah!

Thus did Anna Russell satirize Mayflower descendants, and I thought it was hilarious, and exercised a bit of what might be called reverse snobbery about it.  I got taken down a peg or two -- though I still think the song is funny -- when I discovered my own direct descent from John Alden & Priscilla Mullins of the Mayflower!  The line runs from John Alden & Priscilla Mullins through Joseph Alden, Isaac Alden, Mercy Alden (married Zaccheus Packard the younger), Eleazer Packard, Richards Packard, John Alden Packard, Mathew Hale Packard, Oscar Merry Packard, Walter Hetherington Packard, Arden Packard, and me!

 So, yeah, one joins a lineage society for "bragging rights," though the actual number of descendants of the Mayflower living today constitutes an "exclusive" club of some 35 million people.  H'mmm.  Those pilgrims and their progeny down the years have been busy!

One also joins such a society out of a love of history and a desire to be part of that history.  I have been an American history buff since I was a child, and in my teens I had a subscription to American Heritage magazine which lasted long into adulthood.  Out of a need to free up some of our scarce storage space, I gave all those years of American Heritage to a high-school teacher friend of mine for the school's library. 

So it turned out that I have a close association with Thanksgiving, as some of my family were actually there at the table in 1620.

However . . . though I am a Mayflower descendant, I also have studied Florida's colonial Spanish history, living as I do only 35 miles or so from St. Augustine, which has seen now over five hundred years of the history of Florida and of the United States.  Thus, I know that Plymouth in 1620 was not the first Thanksgiving on these shores.  In September of 1565, in gratitude for the safe delivery of himself and his crew, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and his crew and the Seloy band of Timucuan natives celebrated their own Thanksgiving.  It's the grateful thing to do, whoever, wherever, and whenever we are.  Happy Thanksgiving!

   

Throwback Thursday: Back Home Again in Indiana

Left to right:  Florence Geneva Reed, Florence Elizabeth [McKee] Reed, Mary [LeSourd] Reed, William S. LeSourd.

The four people in the photograph are members of my mother's paternal line, the Reed family of Logansport, Indiana.  The photograph was taken sometime in the 1930s, judging by the clothing.  Florence Geneva Reed was mom's aunt.  Florence Elizabeth [McKee] Reed was her grandmother.  Mary [LeSourd] Reed was the wife of mom's uncle, Perry Wilmer Reed, the oldest of the eleven children of Francis Harvey Reed and Florence Elizabeth McKee.  William S. LeSourd was Mary's brother.  When mom's father, Benjamin Franklin Reed, was killed in a railroad accident in 1917, when mom was barely a year old, the Reeds took her and her sister Margaret away from their mother, Ruth [Nave] Reed.  Margaret was adopted by Don Francis Reed and his wife, Grace [McElroy] Reed, and mom was adopted by Perry and Mary Reed.

       

Wordless Wednesday:  Re-enlisting

 

Tombstone Tuesday:  Daniel & Mildred Marshall

 

 

This is the gravestone of my husband's paternal great-grandparents, Daniel McLeod Marshall and Mildred Eva Hendrix.  Daniel fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side, in an Alabama regiment of artillery.   Mildred ("Millie") was his third wife.  They relocated after the Civil War to Apopka, Florida, then to Lakeland, where Daniel established a farm, where he grew oranges and ran cattle.

We went down to Lakeland several years ago.  We could not find the family plot, so we went to the cemetery office.  The kind people there said they'd send someone out to help us find it, along with other family tombstones in the same plot.  We followed the cemetery employees to the tombstones, several of them in a curb-bordered family plot.  They'd all been turned over.  Cemetery workers righted the stones and placed them properly.   We took pictures.

While at the cemetery office, we got a little information from their records, one bit of which sounds like the bones of a horror story told by an old granny to a group of children in a dark old cabin.  The record said that Millie Marshall had died in 1930 and been buried in 1929. 

  

 

Military Monday:  On the Flight Line

The photo posted here is my father, LT Arden Packard, USN, with his Corsair aircraft.  It was taken at Naval Air Station Miami, FL, about 1942.  He had been fascinated by flight at least since high school, if not earlier.  At his school, he had been a member of the Aero Club in the 1920s.  When he graduated in 1929, he enlisted in the Navy and took basic training at San Diego, where he was enumerated in the 1930 census.  He was also enumerated in that census at the family home in Pasadena, nobody having told the enumerator that he was in the Navy and stationed elsewhere.

He qualified to take a competitive exam for an appointment to Annapolis.  He passed, and entered the Naval Academy in the summer of 1930, graduating in 1934.  He received orders to the aircraft carrier Saratoga, and after that, to the Farragut.  In 1936, he was sent to Naval Air Station Pensacola, FL, for flight training.  Upon completion, he was ordered to the carrier Yorktown, but this time as a member of a fighter squadron, not as a member of the deck department, as before.  From there, he spent time attached to carriers out of Norfolk, VA, and then Coronado, CA.

Dad was medically retired in February of 1941, but was called back to active duty in October of 1941.  Perhaps no solid information was circulating about what was about to happen that December, but there was some sort of build-up going on if the Navy was recalling broken-down old pilots. 

His next assignment was to Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida, as a flight instructor.  During that assignment, he was sent to the Empire Central Flying School, a facility of the Royal Air Force in England, to learn the tactics the British were using against the Germans.  He brought that knowledge back to NAS Jax to teach his students.

Dad retired from the Navy after World War II was over.  He died 25 April 1954.

 

  

Sentimental Sunday:  Proud Parent

Last year, our older daughter earned a doctorate in audiology.  Her practice works with military veterans.  She enjoys working with them, and feels comfortable with them probably because her father and I are both veterans.  We are hugely proud of her.

After the graduation ceremonies, we celebrated at a favorite New Orleans-style restaurant.  The hostess and co-owner of the place is wonderfully imaginative, and in honor of our daughter's accomplishment, she made this sign and placed it next to our table:

 

Shopping Saturday:  "Do Day"

My aunt Elizabeth Reed . . .   Wait.  I need to explain something, briefly.  She really was my first cousin once removed.  My mother was an intra-family adoption, and Elizabeth Reed became her adoptive sister.  So my sister and brother and I knew her as our aunt.  We also knew her as "Sissy," because she was our mother's sister.

"Do Day" is what Sissy called Saturday, when she ran all her errands.  During the week, she worked as the Director of Health Information for the State of Florida.  At that time, the 1950s and 1960s, the agency for which she worked was known as the State Board of Health.  These days, it is the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.  Its headquarters are in Jacksonville, where we lived.

When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, I would ride with Sissy on these errands.  We enjoyed each other's company, having fun with word plays, silly songs, and jokes.  We also sometimes had more serious discussions, and I learned a lot about health and about how Florida was in previous decades, from her experiences as a young nursing student, a public health nurse, and her travels around the state in her job with the Board of Health.

One of those experiences -- one among many -- brings a smile to my lips now, some 60 years later.  She was traveling in central Florida, seeking a small town in which she was to give a presentation on some aspect of public health.  She had a car issued to her by the state.  It was a 1958 Chevrolet, a big and heavy car, as cars were back then.  She stopped at a gas station in a rural area.  In those days, the gas station attendant would come out from the station office and fill the gas tank, check the air pressure in the tires, clean the windshield, and open the hood and check the oil level.  As the scrawny country man was cleaning the windshield, he kept looking at my aunt.  You have to know at this point that she was large, and had been all her life, topping out in adulthood at some 300 pounds.  It was a cross she bore all her life, but she came to terms with it and developed a sense of humor about it.  The gas station attendant finally said, "I notice you're a large woman." 

At that point, Sissy began to bristle.  Bad enough this man had been staring at her; now he's on about her weight.  The attendant continued, "I like large women.  My wife's a large woman."  He paused, then uttered the line that absolutely broke her up, and got bellylaughs whenever she told the tale:  "I always say I never want to have to shake no sheet to find no woman."

When I reached 14, the age when most Florida teenagers began to learn how to drive, Sissy became my driving instructor.  We kids got our "learner's permits," driver's licenses that required a licensed adult to be in the car with us and who taught us how to drive.  Sissy's private car was a 1955 Chevy Bel-Air, and it was a bear to drive.  I developed arm muscles driving that thing!  Once I had mastered the basics and could manage safely, I became Sissy's chauffeur on "Do Day."  It was good experience.  The Southside of Jacksonville had been a separate town called South Jacksonville early in the 20th century, but it eventually got gobbled up by the larger city.  It still had a small-town atmosphere.  

Sissy liked to shop in the San Marco shopping area, a two-block length of two parallel streets with a slew of businesses.  There was Coley-Walker drugs, one of the owners of which lived in the same block my mom and sister and brother and I did, and around the corner from Sissy's house.  There was The Silk Shop, a fabric store, owned by the Barnerts, whose daughter was an elementary-school classmate of mine.  Mims Bakery and Marsh-Kornegay photographers were owned by fellow parishoners at the church Sissy and I attended, All Saints Episcopal Church.  Kinship, friendship, and other links ran all through the area. 

Sissy lived a life of service, and was a great influence that guided me in the same direction.  She had a fulfilling life, but part of that was to soothe the wound her weight was to her.  On the wall in her bedroom was a poem that I memorized; the author remains Anonymous.  It described an outlook that infused her life:

They who have worn the jester's cap, its bells still ringing

Fear not to face their destiny with voices singing.

They will confound a sober world forever after

Who hide their hearts behind a sleeve of laughter.

 

 

 The Hive Mind: Eliminating 1880 as Possible Birth Year of Harold Blaine White

In a comment on my last post, yesterday, Janice M. Sellers suggested that the possible birth year of 1880 might be eliminated from consideration by assuming that Harold White's second wife, Cora Diamond, did not know of his previous marriage to Blanch Stockmyer.  Janice's suggestion works out mathematically, too.  Assuming Cora did not know about Harold's first marriage, we take his age of 43 on the 1930 census and subtract 25, his age at first marriage; the result shows he and Cora had been married 18 years.  1930 minus 18 comes out to 1912, the probable year of their marriage.  This is consistent with his age of 25 at first marriage being in support of an assumption on Cora's part that his marriage to her was his first.  Using Cora's age at first marriage as 18 works out mathematically to the same conclusion: 36, her stated age on the 1930 census, minus her age at first marriage, 18, works out to 18 years of marriage, and again that comes out to 1912.  A marriage date of 1912 is inferred from the fact that their first child was born in 1912.  The baby might have been a little "early."  I now need to seek support for 1912 being their year of marriage in documents such as their marriage license applications (and again, I bless Indiana for taking such thorough information on those documents!) and either a divorce record for Harold and Blanche Stockmyer, or her death certificate.

The enumeration date on the sheet of the 1930 census on which Harold White was counted was 19 April, before his birthday.  Subtracting 25 from 1912 (on Cora's assumption that their marriage was his first) yields 1887 as Harold's year of birth; the same year results from subtracting his age of 43 on that census from the census year of 1930.  But as he was enumerated before his birthday, that makes his age 44 on that birthday in 1930, putting his birth year at 1886.  Now we have three documents that lend some support to 1886 as being Harold's year of birth: the 1930 census (assuming Cora did think his marriage to her was his first), the 1930 census (a simple subtraction of 44 from 1930), and their daughter Maxine's birth certificate.  This still leaves 1885 as the most probable year of his birth, just by the greater number of documents supporting 1885 over the other years.

This also greatly lessens the probability of 1880 being his birth year.  We may even eliminate 1880 from consideration based on the mathematical proof of 1886 being his birth year,  referring to the 1930 census.  However, mathematical proof is not genealogical proof, so 1880 can remain marginally possible, but improbable.

The Hive Mind works!  Thank you, Janice!

 The Many Birth Years of Harold White (1885?-1960)

Harold Blaine White, my maternal grandmother's third husband, though not my grandfather, was born in Indiana.   The intrigue has been in trying to determine in what year he was born.  Sources range from 1880 to 1887.   

I first found Harold White in this investigation in the 1900 census, enumerated at age 15 in his father's household, a farm in Kosciusko County, Indiana.[1]  His birth month and year are given as April 1885.  The enumeration day was 18 June 1900, so his birthday had already passed.  This information is internally consistent. 

Next time Harold White shows up is with a stated age of 21 on 24 November 1905, when he took out a marriage license with 18-year-old Blanch Stockmyer in Kosciusko County. [2]  He gives his birth date as 26 April 1884.  In Indiana at that time, the age for a male to marry without parental consent was 21.  The age for a female to marry without consent was 18.  If Harold White was actually born in 1885 rather than 1884, he would have been 20 years old rather than 21, and would have had to obtain his father's consent.  It is likely that he did not want to, or could not, obtain such consent, so he lied about his age. 

On 13 May 1912, Harold and Cora White (his second wife), were presented with a new son, Eugene, by the noble stork.[3]  Harold's age appears as 25, making his birth year 1887.  The informant is not named on the birth certificate, but it is likely that the informant was the mother, whose age is listed as 18.  She may have been unclear as to her husband's actual age or his birth year.  The reporting of Harold's age on this child's birth certificate in 1912 is in direct conflict with his marriage license application in 1905, on which he gave his birth year as 1884, probably so he could present himself as being 21, of legal age to marry without parental consent.  It also conflicts with the 1930 census, detailed below, on which he is recorded with an age at first marriage of 25, a figure which is at odds with the 1905 marriage information. [See further discussion below, at 1930 census.]

A daughter, Violet, was born to Harold and Cora 13 December 1913.[4]  Harold's age is shown to be 27, which would yield a birth year of 1886.  Cora's age is given as 20.  Again, the mother was probably the informant on this information.

Maxine, the third child of the Whites was born 18 April 1916.[5]  On this registration, Harold's age is 30 and Cora's is 23.  The birth took place before Harold's birthday that year, making him 31 on that birthday, so his birth year comes out to 1885.  Cora may have been the informant.

Harold White did his patriotic duty on 12 September 1918, and registered for the draft.[6]  He gave his age as 33, and his birth date as 26 April 1885.  He would have been asked by the draft board member to answer the questions on the registration, so the information here came from Harold himself.  There is no conflict between the date of the event and Harold's birth year as stated.

Harold White has not yet been found in the 1910 or 1920 censuses.

The information in the 1930 census on Harold White's age and the age given for his first marriage, 25, provides an internal inconsistency, and a conflict with other records, most notably his 1905 marriage license application.[7]  In the 1930 census, Harold's age is given as 43.  The enumeration date was 9 April, before Harold's birthday, so at that birthday, he would have been 44.  This leaves us with 1886 as his birth year.  This is one of only two documents among those so far found that suggest 1886 as his birth year, though neither of them specifically state that it was.  The other document leading to 1886 as Harold's birth year, though not stating it outright, is the birth certificate of the couple's daughter Violet.  This might indicate an informant other than Harold himself.  Likewise, the calculation of his age at first marriage being 25, subtracted from his marriage year of 1905, draw us to 1880 as his birth year.  Compared to all the other documents so far found, this year is an outlier, way out of line with the rest of the information at present known.  This, too, seems to indicate that the informant on this census was someone other than Harold White.

For the 1940 census, enumerators were instructed to place an "X" in a circle next to the name of the informant for a household, if a member of the household was the informant for a particular household or family (as a household could include more than one family).  The enumerator for the section of the census in which Harold White was enumerated in 1940 did not place that mark on any of the households he enumerated.  It would be a stretch to imagine that, for pages and pages of census information, all the informants had been other than household or family members.  Thus, the information recorded by this particular enumerator is no more reliable than that on any other census in any other year.

 Harold's age is recorded on the 1940 census as 54.[8]  The enumeration day was 9 April, before Harold's birthday that year, so he was 55 on that birthday, 26 April.  That would point to 1885 as his birth year.  

On 27 April 1942, Harold White registered for the World War II draft.[9]  This registration date was one day after his birthday, 26 April, and he gave his age as 55.  The resulting calculation yields a birth year of 1887.  

Harold White married my twice-widowed grandmother, Ruth [Nave] Reed Pennington, in  August of 1932.[10]  On the marriage license, he gives his birth date as 26 April 1885.

On the 1950 census, the enumerator failed to record the enumeration date.[11]  However, moving back through the census sheets taken by this enumerator, Nellie Reed, shows her beginning her enumerations on 23 May.  Harold White's age is stated as 65, and as the census was taken on him after his birthday, his birth year comes out to 1885.

Finally, there is his death certificate.[12] Harold died 25 December 1960, in an institutional setting.  No informant is named on his death certificate.  Only his birth year is given: 1885.  He was 75 years old.  

So, in what year was Harold White born?

1880 - Only one document leads by inference to this outlying year.  The 1930 census states his age at first marriage as 25.  Subtracting 25 years from the year of first marriage, 1905, yields 1880.  However, his first marriage took place on 24 November 1905, and he reported his age at that time as 21, though this may have been a falsification to avoid having to ask for his father's permission to marry.  By its direct conflict with the 1905 marriage license and the fact that it is out of the range of the other possible birth years, 1880 does not appear to be a good candidate for Harold's birth year.

1884 - Harold's stated birth date on the 1905 marriage license application is 26 April 1884.  Nowhere else is the year 1884 stated or implied to be his birth year.  This single appearance of that possible birth year and the likelihood that Harold lied about his age in 1905 to get around needing parental permission to marry make it unlikely that Harold was born in 1884.

1885 -  If we go by the old standard of "preponderance of evidence," 1885 wins hands down as Harold's birth year.  This birth year is supported by the 1900 census, the birth certificate of his daughter Maxine, Harold's World War I draft registration, the 1940 census, his application to marry Ruth Pennington, the 1950 census, and his death certificate, though this last document is of highly questionable reliability.  Seven documents out of the twelve so far discovered favor 1885, but that does not yet put the lock on it because the other contenders for Harold's birth year cannot be completely disproven.

1886 - Support for this possible birth year is found in Harold's daughter  Maxine's birth certificate, and the 1930 census.  That is only two of the twelve documents surveyed.  1886 is less likely to be Harold's birth year than is 1885.

1887 - The year 1887 shows up or can be inferred from Harold's son Eugene's birth certificate, and the World War II draft.  1887 is also less likely than 1885 to be Harold's birth year.

So we are left with no more than the strong possibility that Harold was born in 1885 rather than any of the other suggested birth years.  The search continues for more documents, and it is possible that the best we can hope for is to be able to say with a modicum of qualified assurance that Harold White was born in 1885.

There is one consistent element in this whole confusion:  Those documents that make definite birth date statements all agree on one thing:  Harold was born on 26 April of whatever year the documents may mention or suggest.

NOTES:

[1] Census Place: Troy, Whitley, Indiana; Roll: 414; Page: 8; Enumeration District: 0114; FHL microfilm: 1240414.  Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1900. T623, ED 114, Sheet 8, Dwelling 172, Family 174.

[2]  "Indiana Marriages, 1811-2019," database with images, FamilySearch(https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GPXX-938Z?cc=1410397&wc=Q8SH-5TM%3A962985201%2C963051301 : 5 February 2016), Kosciusko > 1905-1906 Volume N > image 86 of 223; Indiana Commission on Public Records, Indianapolis.  (accessed 15 November 2023.)

[3]  Indiana, Birth Certificates, 1907-1940, Indiana Archives and Records Administration; Indianapolis, Indiana; Birth; Year: 1912; Roll: 002. Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/60871/images/40474_358007-01488?pId=155049355.  (accessed 15 November 2023.)

[4] Indiana, Birth Certificates, 1907-1940, Indiana Archives and Records Administration; Indianapolis, Indiana; Birth; Year: 1913; Roll: 002.  Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/60871/images/40474_357402-02175?pId=2058418. (accessed 15 November 2023.)

[5] Indiana, Birth Certificates, 1907-1940, Indiana Archives and Records Administration; Indianapolis, Indiana; Births; Year: 1916; Roll: 003.  Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/60871/images/40474_357898-00914?pId=3178908. (accessed 15 November 2023.)

[6]  "United States World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918", database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7H1X-W9T2 : 29 December 2021), Harold Blaine White, 1917-1918.

[7]  Ancestry.com, Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2002.Original data - United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, ED 9-14, sheet 11B, Dwelling 304, Family 333.  https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/6224/images/4584674_00740?pId=117850519. (accessed 15 November 2023.)

[8]   Ancestry.com, Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012.Original data - United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940. T627, Sheet 4A, Household #78. https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/2442/images/M-T0627-01030-00378?pId=55811125 (accessed 15 November 2023.)

[9] U.S., World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942. The National Archives At St. Louis; St. Louis, Missouri; Record Group Title: Records of the Selective Service System; Record Group Number: 147. Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/1002/images/2wwii_2371837-4488?pId=8813559.  (accessed 15 November 2023.)

[10]   Newspapers.com - The South Bend Tribune - 14 Aug 1942 - Page 29.  Notice of marriage license application, Harold White and Ruth Pennington.  https://www.newspapers.com/clip/118136363/marriage-of-white-pennln/?xid=637 .  (accessed 15 November 2023).  [Actual marriage record not located yet.]

[11]  Ancestry.com.  United States of America, Bureau of the Census; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790-2007; Record Group Number: 29; Residence Date: 1950; Home in 1950: Tippecanoe, Kosciusko.  ED 43-24, Sheet 49 (corrected from 121),  Dwelling # 581, Family 156.  https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/62308/images/43290879-Indiana-230908-0051?pId=131170156.  (accessed 15 November 2023.)

[12]  Ancestry.com. Indiana, Death Certificates, 1899-2011, Indiana Archives and Records Administration; Indianapolis, IN, USA; Death Certificates; Year: 1960; Roll: 15.  https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/60716/images/44494_350865-00496?pId=1728451. (accessed 15 November 2023.)

No calculators were harmed in the creation of this blog.  However, one did get a bit testy after the 753rd calculation.