52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 35 -- All Mixed Up

This week's blog prompt presented by Amy Johnson Crow, 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, is "All Mixed Up."  We're to blog on which ancestors get confused with other people.  I have a good case, and I have to be blunt and charge FamilySearch.org for being a big cause of this mixup.

My mother was an intra-family adoption.  Her birth parents were Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed (1888-1917) and Ruth Nave (1892-1951).  Frank Reed was killed in a railroad accident when my mother was not quite one year old.  The Reeds had issues with Ruth Nave, and in the words of my mother's birth sister, my aunt Margaret, they "ganged up on her" and took my mother and aunt Margaret away from her and had two of Frank's brothers and their wives adopt the girls.  Their brother, my Uncle Don, the oldest of the three, stayed with his mother, as he was 16 years old.

My mother was adopted by her uncle Perry Wilmer Reed (1885-1937) and his wife Mary LeSourd (a variant spelling) (1889-1978).  And here's where the mixup begins.  Many people have posted to the tree on FamilySearch that Perry and Mary Reed were my mother's actual parents.  This is wrong, and I have mom's birth certificate citing Frank and Ruth Reed as her birth parents, and a copy of the final adoption decree recording mom's adoption by Perry and Mary Reed.

I have tried numerous times to correct this.  I put the correct information with source citations on the FamilySearch tree, and come back only to find that someone has replaced my correct information with the incorrect attribution of my mother's parentage to Perry and Mary Reed, usually without source citations.

I have given up on that FamilySearch tree because I am just mortally tired of correcting misinformation and providing source citations, only to find that someone has put back the wrong information.  I love FamilySearch for the access to documents, and for their wonderful and very instructive wiki.  In those two aspects, it is a fount of information par excellence.

But don't even try to induce me to go back to using their tree.  I'm done with it.

However, I'm not totally down on collaboration.  I am a user of WikiTree, mostly because they do require, encourage, and endorse good source citations on their tree.  But even at that, when I get notices of all sorts of famous people I may be descended from, some of them trace through Perry and Mary Reed rather than my mother's actual parents, Frank and Ruth Reed.  

In the background, for those of you who are Star Wars fans, I hear the voice of Admiral Akbar.

"It's a trap!"

 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

     

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.