a mystery solved

[castiron]

I've been interested in my genealogy for a long time, though it's one of those hobbies that's been on the back burner for several years.

Two impetuses originally got me hooked. One was my mother's aunt's research on her family, tracing her parents' surname lines back to the original immigrants to the U.S.; as a kid, I found the mimeographed pages of family tree fascinating. (I'm still fascinated by the connections; go through any late 19th-century census of Frederick, Maryland, and if the person's white and born in the U.S., chances are pretty good that they're either my relative or have a common cousin with me.)

The other was the near complete lack of information on my dad's family. He was dropped off in an orphanage when he was four and grew up in a foster home. I knew his parents' names, I'd seen his grandfather's obituary, and that was about it. Fortunately, that was enough for me to find them on census microfilms and to start working backwards, and ultimately to link up with research other people had done; we've found most of Dad's 19th century ancestors now.

We also found a couple surprises about his parents. Dad was told that his father was killed in Europe in WWII. So it was a bit of a shock several years back when I found his death certificate showing that he'd died in California in 1993.

Our theory is that Dad's parents divorced, and since that was still a huge stigma in the 1940s, Dad and his siblings were told that their father had died. Sadly, we've never been able to find any actual records supporting that that.

Anyway, since no one had heard anything from Dad's mother since the 1970s, and since both her younger sisters had died by the mid-1990s, we figured she'd died by then too. No luck searching the SSDI or state death records, though: we had no idea what her surname was -- we knew she'd remarried at least once but had no further information -- and while her first name's uncommon, there weren't any records for anyone with that first name and her birthdate.

Well.

Today I was searching a genealogical records site to find some information about an author's death date, and while I was there I did a search on my grandmother just for the heck of it.

I found an amendment to her birth certificate.

Her original birth certificate said simply Baby [surname] rather than giving her actual name; she'd filed the amendment to add her full name to it. I already had the data about her birth; what the form gave me was her residence at that time, San Diego, and the name she was using -- her middle and maiden names, without the first name.

And when I checked the SSDI for that name and her birthdate? Bingo. Born in Texas. Died in San Diego.

In 2001.

I'm laughing at that because otherwise I'd be banging my head against the wall going "*dammit*". If I'd known she was still alive and where she was, I could have actually *met* her. Yeah, one assumes that if she'd wanted any contact with her kids or grandkids, at some point she'd have tried to do so. And she may well have been someone who I'm better off *not* having known. But still. The questions, they will remain unanswered.

(Dad's going to order the death certificate to confirm; I'm looking forward to seeing what it says.)