Obituaries: search example
My great grandfather Jesh came to the United States by himself as a young man. He moved to a small village in Minnesota where he lived for a time with his mother's brother. He later married and had eleven children. It was not until I read his obituary that I realized that he had a sister living in a town several hundred miles away. When I quizzed the living relatives about this, none of them remembered this aunt because, I was told, they had plenty of family without this distant aunt.
Once I knew her name, however, I was able to document her entire family.
One problem that I have encountered with obituaries is the use of names. Especially in big families, the obituary may list the legal name or the nickname. This makes it hard to nail down exactly who was in the family, when trying to correlate information from census data. In one case, I learned that the Ed listed in several obituaries was actually the Isadore listed in the census records. It turned out that the family had a habit of giving the children religious names and
ten actually listing nicknames.
