Yes, I’ve been thoroughly useless. I spent the entire weekend trolling RootsWeb and World Connect and trying to make sense of what I was able to find out. I’m not a genealogist, by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of the thought processes involved are disturbingly like math story problems, so it doesn’t take long before I get brainache. There are about eleventy ways to go at establishing any given link, and unless you hit on the correct combination of parameters, you’ll come up with bupkis. And then, you can look at something twelfty times and on the twelfty-eleventh, the penny suddenly drops, and everything falls neatly into place. It’s frustrating as all hell, but when you stumble across an important key bit of information, it’s also rewarding.
I’ve spent several years, on and off, trying to pin down Esther’s family tree. I had a small amount of information from the letters themselves, and will likely have more as I go continue reading and transcribing them. However, there are huge gaps, especially on her father’s side. Odd that I should stumble upon her mother’s data, when so many women show up as Unknown in family genealogies. I think the saddest, though, is Esther’s paternal grandmother, who thus far is Unknown Unknown. She was someone, damnit, and deserves better than that. So, I spent the weekend trying to figure out who she could’ve been. A fool’s errand, that, as all I know is that she probably came from the Dayton, Ohio area and that she married an Unknown Munro who probably came from the Seekonk, Massachusetts area. They were probably married prior to March 1864 (their son’s birthday is 14 January 1865). I don’t know where they were married, but I’m guessing it was either near her family’s Dayton area home or in La Salle County, Ohio, where their son was born. That’s a lot of maybes. I feel like I’ve been chasing myself around and around in circles, because I keep running into the same false doors and brick walls.
All I can say is that I’m thankful that I don’t feel much of an urge to do this sort of research on my own family, because it’d be every bit as frustrating.
EEEEEP! And, just to show how fickle this whole process is, I justthisverysecond found, via an LDS records search, that Esther’s paternal grandparents were Warren C. Munro and Emma Pearson. I’m tellin’ ya’, this genealogy thing could drive a person to tears.
red paper boat 