Friday, June 21, 2013

Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage

Today I was in the county courthouse for Dodge County, Wisconsin and was looking up my maiden name of CRINION. I decided to record all the entries found in the indexes for birth, marriages and deaths.

I started with the births and found 13 birth records. Then I looked up the death and found 8 records. Finally I looked up the Marriages and looked up via the males first and found 4 records. I noticed my great grandparents had two entries, one in 1895 and another in 1936. I wondered why there would be two marriage records. But anyway, I proceeded to record the marriages found based on females and found 13 lines.

After recording all the records listed in the indexes, I had to look up the marriage certificate dated 1936.

The certificate of marriage listed my great grandfather, David Crinion and my great grandmother, Amelia Crinion. The witnesses were my grandfather, Lawrence Crinion and his sister-in-law, Mrs. F W Crinion. My great grandfather was 72 years old and my great grandmother was 65 years old. It listed that they were both previously married to each other on Nov 6, 1895 and there were divorced on Nov 6, 1924. This marriage took place on October 5, 1936. This means they were divorced for 12 years.

This made me wonder if I ever found them in the 1930 census records. So I checked my genealogy software and sure enough I don't have the 1930 census record recorded for either of them.

I looked up David and found him listed as divorced in 1930 living as a border. I haven't been able to find my great grandmother in the 1930 census records yet. I have seen a city directory for 1931 that shows Amelia living in Racine, Wisconsin and I think it states she is a wid of David. This has me very interested, so my next step is to see if I can find their divorce records and see if I can get a copy or look at the file.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Research trip

It has been almost a month since I have posted anything, because it has been forever since I have done anything genealogy related. Well actually, on Father's Day I did give my niece some genealogy stuff on her ancestry and we set up a date to do some genealogy in July. I also hope to do a little research this Thursday and Friday (keep fingers crossed) and I might visit some courthouses.

It always seems when I make plans, something else comes up. But I have made a promise to myself that my house remodeling project will be placed on the back burner for those two days. I will need to look at my research project folder and my research notes that I have created to see what I want to do those two days.

What is my research project folder? Well, sometimes I find leads through records on Ancestry such as vital records indexes. It doesn't give me enough information for me to determine if this is my person or not, so I will print out a "printer friendly" version of the information, and I place it into my research folder. Then I will put a note in my genealogy software to-do-list and I will place it into a special category based on the county it will be found in. I then print out this to-do-list when I am ready to take my research on the road. I have even created to-do-list items for each respository, with the location, hours and phone number. This way I have that information handy to for me to type into my GPS to make it easier to find the building. My list has all the research that I want to do and the "printer friendly" sheets give me the paper that I will use to write my notes. Such as "not this family" or I can transcribe the information found on the record on the backside of the page. I can't always afford to buy copies of every vital record, I usually only purchase those for my direct ancestors but these sheets with the information that I transcribe becomes the next best thing.

I hope to find some wills or probate records for some ancestor's of mine. The indexes that I found stated that the records exists, so now I want to look at them for more informaiton.

Keep your fingers crossed that all goes well and that my research trip will happen. So start planning your trip before times slips by. Or you will find yourself a month later and still no better off than you were today.