Family History

My paternal grandmother, Loretta Haines Barrett, was into our family history as long as I can remember.  Unfortunately, I was not.  I couldn't care less who these people were especially since they were dead and gone.

Now after most of my family members born before 1920 are long gone I have become a genealogy fanatic.  I want to log all of the information I have (way too much) into ancestry.com and find living cousins (albeit distant cousins) on ancestry and facebook.

I started with a book compiled by my grandmother, Loretta Haines Barrett, and Eileen McCrea Traxler, my 2nd cousin 2x removed.  The book contains a brief history, their children, and descendants of Alexander and Janet (Forest) Waterston in Williams County, Ohio.  It's 92 pages how hard can that be?

I signed up for ancestry.com around December 27, 2010.  I remember taking the book and my laptop to my job.  When I had breaks I would input as much as I can.  I finished with the book around April 2011.  Currently I have 47 Waterston descendants on Facebook.  Let's say 10 of those are family I already knew of and the rest got my crazy message, Hey you don't know me but...and still accepted me as a friend.  I do have several who never wrote back and one who said I don't know you even though I tried to explain - I'm not a stalker!

I used to live in Ohio which would have made the searching easier, but now I live in Lake Havasu City, Arizona and I rely heavily on websites to help me find information or contact others. 

Some of the best websites I've used are:

• Ancestry.com:   without a doubt worth every penny (don't sign up for world, ask me first)
• Find A Grave.com:  amazing, ordinary people can post people who have passed on, and ask for photos of their headstones.  Find a grave puts out a request to people near the cemeteries who have said they would like to help others.
• Williams County, Ohio (only):  Jane Kelly at the Bryan Genealogy Library is a great help.  They have a website mywcpl.org that you can search for obituaries.  If you find one, the library will locate, copy, and send it to you.

I'll post more websites later, but those are a few that got me going strong.  I also was able to visit with my Grand Aunt Helen Reader Hays who had so much information on our family.  She was a wealth of information.  I have another Grand Aunt who didn't seem to want to talk about it so much.

I feel like a detective when I'm doing some of this.  Most of it was routine, but you really have to match dates and names when working with the census records (watch the spellings in those).  I remember someone once saying one of my Grand Aunts was not the biological daughter of my great grandfather, John William Richard.  So that was the only spark I needed.

I was able to find a research assistant who lived in Ohio to help me dig around for information.  She was able to locate divorce records for my great grandmother, Elva Angeline Edwards Richard's first marriage.  She had two girls with her first husband, John Jacob Custar.  He wanted to keep one of the girls instead paying Elva $3 a week, but after a few months Elva's new husband, JW and her father, Frank Edwards went and picked up my grand aunt, Pearl.

Now this leads me to an even bigger mystery, the oldest girl apparently died when she was 18 but nobody ever spoke of her at our family gatherings.  I have all of the Williams County, Ohio cemetery records and I cannot find her listed under either surname.  I was told to check the Montpelier Health Department and they have no record of her.  The family lived close to Camden, Michigan and Elva and JW are buried there, so I thought maybe Dorothy is there.  I searched the Camden Cemetery with my two cousins and we found nothing.  My next move is to write the Hillsdale County, Michigan Health Department.