Greetings from Shelter-In-Place!
Hope you are all staying safe and well, and are not going too crazy at home!
At this time, I was supposed to be in Ohio and Kentucky conducting field research. With that trip delayed until after libraries reopen, there has been much to keep me busy at home. Marty's usual work is not happening, but he has found other avenues for utilizing his many talents. We are among the fortunate, in the midst of our current viral pandemic.
I have spent a good deal of time hammering at some walls that have plagued our family tree, with some success. Much of that work has been related to a previous post I made to this weblog nearly a year ago, A DNA Breakthrough and Conference News, in which I discussed the quest to uncover the identity of the man named "Tom Ford" that family members have claimed was the father of my 2nd great-grandfather, John Thomas Romans.
To recap, I was able to pinpoint a young man named Thomas Benton Ford who had grown up in the neighborhood of my 3rd great-grandmother, Angelina "Adeline" Romans, and was close to her age. Through further study of this Tom Ford's family, I was fortunate to find two DNA matches who are descendants of Tom's father, Harbin Hawkins Ford, through Tom's half-sister. I am currently writing an official genealogical proof for this research and will announce on this blog when it is published.
Originally, as stated in the previous blog post noted above, I doubted that Tom Ford's legitimate son, Edwin Elliott Ford (called Elliott), had had children, because he had been only briefly married to Henrietta Taylor before he died tragically of typhoid at age 24. Turns out, I was incorrect about this!
Thanks to newspapers available through MyHeritage.com, I found young Mr Ford's obituary, which provided not only the news that he had a daughter born December of 1910 (same as my Grandpa C.P., mentioned in previous blog entries), but also named the parents of Elliott's wife, Henrietta. Yay!
The Bourbon News, Paris KY, Volume XXX, Number
4, 13 Jan 1911.
My next task was to follow the movements of Henrietta Taylor Ford and hopefully learn the name of Baby Girl Ford. Further poking through The Bourbon News led me to more info about Henrietta, including the name of her daughter (Lelia Jane Ford, called Jane) and Henrietta's brief marriages to Joseph Gay Mitchell and then Forest Reuben Eyer, with whom she and her daughter were living in Lee IA on the 1920 Federal Census.
Henrietta stayed married to Mr Eyer for some years and still resided with him in Kansas City MO on the 1930 Census, but Jane was no longer in their household, leading me to believe that she may have married. Henrietta's fourth husband appears to have been Charles Hunter Dishman, whose obituary from 1968 states that she was still his wife at the time of his death. At this time, I have no further vital information about Henrietta.
Jane Ford is found in the 1930 Census to be the wife of Bradford Preston Young and living in Pittsburgh PA. In the 1940 Census, the two were still married with a son. This marriage did not last, however. Mr Young remarried in 1961, lived his final years in Arizona, and is buried with his 2nd wife Norma, who died in 1982.
FindAGrave.com, memorial #157339425.
There are as yet no signs that Jane married again. I am still in search of further records for her. She lived into her 90s and is buried in Kansas, with her maiden name on the grave marker.
FindAGrave.com, memorial #75762562, photo by Jaunice Hess.
--Annie
"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other."--Mother Teresa
