Genealogy Roadshow looking for stories for season 2 to tape in New Orleans, LA, Philadelphia, PA, and St. Louis, MO: http://www.grcasting.com/
Can't resist a good orphan heirloom tale!
When did getting buried near your favorite celebrity become a thing?
Brazil 2014: Visualising ancestral and international connections between teams
Myrna Shirey of the Fore-Kin Trails Genealogical Society in Montrose, Colorado will use her grant to
purchase a large flatbed scanner for digitizing a variety of records - to
include funeral home books, newspaper obituaries, and club logs - of the
Montrose area. The society funds the Montrose Genealogy Center that is free to
the public and is completely funded by donations and product sales resulting
from preservation work.
Total respect! 89 year old veteran, told by care home he couldn't go to Normandy, went AWOL and has been found at D-Day celebrations in France.
Today would have been my mother's birthday, so as a small tribute, I've decided to share a piece I wrote just ten weeks after she passed away. Although it's been eight years now, the article still has practical value in terms of searching the SSDI, and selfishly, I wanted to share at least this small snippet of a remarkable woman. Happy Birthday, Mom.
I did something today that I’ve been dreading. I finally got the courage to search for my mother’s name in the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). And yes, she’s in there, although she only passed away about ten weeks ago.
It
still doesn’t truly register. I thought
it would be a few more decades before Mom would appear in this resource that I
use on a daily basis without any thought – without any thought of what it
really means. Each one of those millions
of entries meant the world to someone.
There’s
a part of me that’s convinced it’s someone else – especially because her entry
is so full of red herrings. Unless you
actually knew her, her SSDI listing would send you off on a wild goose chase. And for that reason, I thought it might make
a good example of how we sometimes read too much into the details we find in
the SSDI.
A Nod Toward Privacy
I
realize it would make a much clearer example if I were to reproduce my mother’s
SSDI listing here, but a cautionary voice in me hesitates to provide so much
personal detail – especially since I’ll be dissecting it and providing
additional information. So I hope you’ll
forgive me if I do this semi-anonymously.
Name
To start with, there’s her name. I wondered how she would be listed – whether the SSDI would include her under the first name she never actually used in life. She was a Joisey girl, but had the Southern habit of going by her distinctive middle name. Even in her business life, she used her first initial followed by her middle name. But the SSDI doesn’t know any better, so she’s listed under a name that I don’t associate with her.
And
then there’s the matter of her choice in her last name. She was married twice, once to my father and
again, just five years ago. After my
parents divorced several decades ago, she resumed use of her maiden name. And when she remarried, she chose to retain
that name. So in spite of two marriages,
she died with the same name she was born with – not especially common for women
in their 60s, but a sign of things to come.
Residence and Benefit
The SSDI listings usually provide a location for last residence and last benefit, and Mom’s is no exception. We frequently use this as a proxy for place of death – and in many cases, it’s a good indication.
But
in this case, these clues are misleading because my mother, like so many these
days, was a snowbird. She passed away in
Florida, but
you’d never know that from her entry. If
you were to try to obtain a copy of her death certificate, her entry would send
you to a different and less genealogy-friendly state, so you’d struggle to even
get a “not found” response.
State of Issue
And then there’s the matter of the state of issue. Even I was surprised at this. I had expected it to be New Jersey, the state of her birth and childhood, as well as her on-and-off again residence over the later years. Instead, it was state where we had resided for a single year.
I
come from a military family, so we bounced around a lot. And for whatever reasons, Mom apparently had
not applied for Social Security until she was in her mid-twenties and married
with two kids. I come from a generation
where we applied for Social Security as youngsters, and now, most do it almost
upon birth. But Mom’s generation of
women often waited until their first job.
So good luck to anyone who tried to seek her in the state of issue,
where she hardly lived long enough to leave any trace.
Outwitting the SSDI
To give you some sense of my mother, several who knew her best assured me that she was up there giving St. Peter a hard time. As one wrote, “She was a powerhouse of a woman. The world is unquestionably a better place for her saunter across the stage. I’ll bet she’s even now demanding to see someone in charge and wondering aloud why this heaven place is not any better organized than it is, after all this time.”
She
was her own woman, and in sense, she managed to outwit even the SSDI. The portrait it provides is seemingly another
woman – and oddly, I find that comforting.
I’m glad she’s almost hidden from view -- but just maybe, someone you’re
seeking is, too, and you’re not so happy about that. I hope this little piece will spark some thoughts
to help you unearth that clever relative of yours who also managed to confound
the SSDI. Mom would like that.
"Finding Your Roots" to return to PBS on Sept 23rd. 30 celebrities including Ben Affleck, Billie Jean King, Ken Burns, Anderson Cooper, Courtney B. Vance, Stephen King, Sally Field, Gloria Reuben, Rebecca Lobo, Carole King, Deepak Chopra, Ming Tsai, Angela Bassett, Valerie Jarrett, Aaron Sanchez, Derek Jeter, Tony Kushner, Nas, Tom Colicchio, and Khandi Alexander. That's 3 Kings if you're keeping track!
Carol Franks is on a
personal mission to ensure that irreplaceable White County, Georgia documents
are preserved. To this end, she creates digital copies of records found only in
filing cabinets at the local library and will use her grant for an external hard drive with auto and cloud
backup.