At the Virginiana Room (VR), deep in the bowels of the CRRL headquarters building downtown, the date is Friday, 07 January 2011, and I’m at my post – Volunteer. I even have a nice Volunteer badge and neck strap, but not the promised CRRL Volunteer tee shirt. Promises, promises, promises!
When there are no customers to help I get to do my own family research, so this is the perfect volunteer job for me; please don’t tell my boss Michelle. I even worked today in spare moments putting several scraps of notes for Sooley Base © into a Word document for cutting and pasting later into the current draft.
One of the chores I accomplished during volunteer hours was calling “cousin” Tony out in Las Cruces, NM. We spent about forty minutes on the phone – my own cell phone, in case the CRRL auditors (Are there any?) check on phone bills or what I put in this Blog. We discussed a myriad of family ancestors, and he cleared up some questions, informing me that certain Bermudez names were a generation earlier than I thought. This resolved some uncertainties, but clearly the recurring use of the same given names creates a research challenge. I have two second cousins, brothers in fact, who spell their family name differently. One spells it Riordan; his brother spells it Reardan. Tony has the same issues with Hispanic names. It makes for difficulties documenting families, and explaining the apparent misspellings. We shared experiences about trying to interest relatives, especially younger family members, in genealogy. He gave me lots of corrections about relationships within the family, and more stories that some may wish not to see the light of day. Every family, as any genealogist knows, has “root rot” – those ancestors no one wants divulged.
I promised to send him a CD with images of family members scanned, and he mentioned a photo he has. The photo is of Josefa Bermudez, his grandmother. He explained that due to age it is in fragile condition. I noted that I considered it a family treasure. I also promised to share his address and phone number with family.
In a phone call/conversation (phoncon) with former sister-in-law, we discussed a number of family ancestors, living relatives and particular research questions centering on Brownsville, Texas and a relative named “Maruca.” Maruca it turns out is Spanish for Mary, but finding that out didn’t solve any questions, merely providing a clue for further research. I cropped several photos of her paternal grandfather for comparison; these date to about 1915 when her grandfather served in the US Cavalry at Fort Brown in Brownsville, TX. Records reflect that someone with his name served with Colonel Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. If that Rough Rider was the same man, it tends to identify one individual in a photo as the grandfather, rather than another.
We both agreed that the grandfather and grandmother never married, perhaps a result of the times in the Old West. Her family, when questioned about him, said to “let the past die.” As a side note, if you are researching ancestors, I recommend using the following search site http://www.beta.familysearch.org/ , as it offers a great deal of BMD (Birth, Marriage, Death) as well as US Census records data, and is currently FREE.
In looking back at the data several hours later (at the AFF gym), I wondered how one could trace a person given just her first name, this is the Maruca, who lived in Salinas, CA and then Downey, CA in the 1970s and 1980s. I will have to pursue phone and resident records, perhaps cross checking between Salinas and Downey. The few clues suggest Maruca was a cousin, perhaps with Garcia or Pena as a surname. Maruca had children, so perhaps they (probably) were Catholics and went through their Holy Communions or Confirmation at Catholic churches in either Salinas or Downey; it would be a really long shot. Other data shows Maruca would have lived in Salinas in the 1975 to Feb 1978 timeframe, so that is another clue.
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