13 October 2008, Olmste(a)d Family Association Newsletter

Sidetracks are often fruitful

     At first look, something that may appear to be easy and will only take a little time rarely turns out that way. Maybe because there are switches in the main line that take you on to sidetracks.
     Last Monday (eight days ago) I downloaded the birth, death, and marriage indexes from ancestry.com; a dozen pages with about 200 total entries. That was the easy part. I’ve since spent the better part of the past six days working with them. Now it shouldn’t have taken that long, but I easily get sidetracked which I’ll cover in a later.
     I take each name and check to see if I already have them in my database of 90,000+ Olmste(a)d names. What I quickly learned is that the Missouri listing of names was far from accurate. The usual misrecording of the surname (with or without the A) was expected and seemed to happen about 50% of the time. There were numerous duplications within the Missouri list itself, sometimes one would have a date added and in others slightly different spellings of the same given name, such as Makeel for MaHugh. I wondered why, particularly on the marriage index entries.
     Ancestry.com has images of the original records available for viewing and what I learned, when looking at the first one, is that the license application was there and often a second part of the same form where names were entered by the officiator as part of his affidavit. The license might be issued to a William Olmsted and the minister might just put W.A. Omstead. It will take more time in the future but I will go back and look at each entry to see if I can learn more than what the index contained, particularly the place of residence which was not indexed. Sometimes the parties crossed state line, usually from Kansas, and I suspect that the age requirement was lower in Missouri. In at least three that I have looked at the women were under the age of 18 and the parents then had to sign their consent. The marriage often happened the same day or the next after the license. On one license of the under age 18 girl the officiator was the JP which makes me wonder if dad was carrying his shotgun when escorting the young couple to the clerks office and then to the JPs office next door. We will never know.
     Anyway, if the person named is not in my database and I cannot place them in an existing family, I create a new record and a copy gets printed and added to my notebooks with some 2000+ “unconnected” individual (or small family groups). Unconnected as I cannot tie them to one of the five primary Immigrant lines (Richard, James, Jabez, Stephen, Jacob); these and a few others are found on the “Immigrant” page on my website. I created 85 sheets, primarily single individuals but when cross listing births to marriages to deaths there were a few individuals that could be linked to multiple events. That phase was completed.
     Back to being sidetracked. One name in the marriage records for an Alta Vineyard jumped out at me on Wednesday. I had seen that name in an obit a little while back and the search was on. Sure enough I found it buried on my desk. But now I was confused. I had a Alta Pearl Vineyard marrying (1935) Albert Lee Olmstead and also found a Pearl Vineyard marrying (1938) a R. Mercille. And then a Mrs. Pearl Olmstead marrying (1948) an Edward Olson. The obit was for an Sally A. (Vineyard) Olmstead who husband had been Albert L. James Olmstead; they had a son Mickey (deceased before her) whose wife was Joyce—all of this in the 1930-1950 period in Saint Louis. Added to this were a Pearl & Clement Vineyard listed in the 1930 census. Confused? I was! The vineyard was getting full of pearls and I begin to believe that there must be more than one Vineyard-Olmstead connection but who and when.
     I found Mickey in the Social Security death index (he died in 1999, age 64) and I found a Charles W. Olmstead who married Joyce Loesch in 1958 which led me to a current phone listing for a Joyce Olmsted in the adjacent county. As it was now late evening and figuring that Joyce (probably in her 70s) might not want a phone call at that hour from a stranger, I put it off until the next day.
     Thursday I had minor surgery (hernia repair) scheduled about forty miles away and we killed the rest of the day with a short stop at Wal-Mart and then dinner at Ponderosa. We were home at 7:00 which was 6 PM Saint Louis time and I made the phone call.
     Joyce was conversant and seemed interested in my story of how I found yet another Olmstead. She informed me there were indeed two “Pearl” Vineyards and provided the phone number for the other one who lived nearby. My next call went to her (age 84) and my store of information grew. The Pearls were sisters, but not twins! Their mother “liked the name Pearl” and her two daughters were named Alta Pearl (who went by “Sally”) and Pearl Alma, the one I was speaking with, who went by her own name.
     Between Joyce and Pearl I was able to fill in some blanks and merge a few records. Sally’s husband was Albert Lee “Jimmie” Olmstead (#3367 in the 1912 genealogy); their only child was Charles Wesley “Mickey” Olmstead. Letters are in the mail to Joyce and Pearl who agreed to correct and add to my information.
     I’ve often said that genealogy is like doing a jigsaw puzzle—you don’t have all of the pieces at the start and you have no idea of what the picture will be or where the edges are. In this case I had multiple pieces that turned out to be the same.
     With much satisfaction from another piece of my genealogical puzzle in place and after working on a few more of the Missouri records, I turned off my computer at midnight and got to bed early—a tiring but fruitful day.
     I’m use to sitting at the computer for hours on end but knowing that I needed to keep stretched out a bit and being a little sore as the effect of any pain medicine I had been given when “under” had long since worn off and knew that I had to get up and move about on a regular schedule. Thus Friday was periodically interspersed with checking Mary’s progress on her garden as we were at the beginning of five glorious fall days to be in the 60s and 70s before it is to turn colder and sprinkle this Wednesday in addition to taking care of some routine things around the office and house including following up to the USAF reunion that we hosted the week before. Saturday and Sunday were spent trying to connect more of the Missouri individuals records which got me on to another sidetrack—reading all of the 1920 and 1930 census entries indexed for Olmste(a)d in that state. That is not a fast operation and I finished it Sunday night; it should have been done earlier in the day but I got sidetracked in the middle of it as I started putting together two greater family groups, one in Saint Louis and one north of Kansas City, which involved searching for other records across state lines and leading to more phone calls that evening.
     Late Sunday evening as I was looking at one of the 1930 Saint Louis census (about the last I transcribed from the online image—some of the writing is worse than mine and the images are not always clear) when adding it to my master computer file it hit me that the couple was Ralph Olmsted of Evansville, IN oldest sister. I have a special bond with Ralph; he is the one that created the reprints and supplements bound in red cloth back in 1978 & 1980. In 1981 on my second visit to visit him he gave me all of the letters, forms, and other things he had collected in his four years project; he was getting tired and knew that he couldn’t continue much longer. (He died the next year at 84.) On that last visit we walked the two blocks to the campus of Evansville University where as a student he had met his wife Jane. He told me his story. It was Evansville College then and he was in (I think) the first graduating class; he never left the University but took a job in the treasurer’s office going and after official retirement in the 1960s became the University’s Archivist. The administration building was renamed “Olmsted Hall” in his honor during, as I recall, at the school’s 50th anniversary. He also proudly showed me the Olmsted Maple planted in front of the building by the OFA in 1980. Oops, sidetracked again—story of my life—a long way from doing Missouri records; but still on this side line remembering his daughter Susan Baldwin who lived in the apartment upstairs in her Dad’s house on Mulberry Street. I wondered if she was still there now; it had been about twenty years since I last talked with her. She worked in the registrar’s office at the University and over the years after Ralph’s death any Olmste(a)d genealogical mail that arrived was given to her and she forwarded it to me.
     Back to my Internet phone book and there she was but at a new address on the edge of the city. Ralph would have loved the computer and the Internet—they are great tools that speed the processes of finding information. Again, it was late evening and so today (another Monday) a phone call was made at noon and Susan remembered my name. We had a nice twenty minute chat—I make good use of unlimited long distance phone service these days so I no longer count my minutes and Mary doesn’t fret now as the bill was often a hundred or more. Susan said that her older sister Anne, with her daughter Jane, had returned for a visit from Anchorage a few years ago and they had wondered if their first cousin Joan Culp was still alive. As we talked I looked at my computer file and didn’t have anything on that branch of the family since Ralph recorded it in his first supplement in 1978. We shared more memories of her Dad and she said that she would update her own family information.
     My track has lots of switches all of which have pieces of the puzzle. Back to my online phone book and three minutes after Jane and I hung up I was talking with Joan. At first Joan was a little surprised as she had just talked to someone, that sounded like me, making arrangement to paint her bedroom. I told her I was not a painter and quickly explained my connection and asked her when she had last spoken with her cousin Susan. She said it had been a number of years but as teenagers they were quite close; in fact the spent the summer together at one of their family farms and it was out behind the barn that the two of them smoked their first cigarette. I told her that I wanted her to surprise Susan with a phone call and provided the new number and she said she would do it right then.
     That is really my payoff for doing this work of genealogy. It is not just the recording of dates and places attached to people’s lives who have no connection with me. It is bringing people together who have a common, though often distant, bond of sharing the same ancestral heritage. Pure genealogy is a science with facts; it is the lives of individuals and the memories that they create that is the art that fills a skeleton with the flesh of a person that makes them real.
Everyone that I meet in person or by phone or letter becomes real to me and that is the joy of being sidetracked as there are many, many stories out there that I want to hear and people that I want to learn a little about as memories make our lives.
     Oops! Another sidetrack in this story. When Mary and I were in Anchorage six years ago we had a free day in the middle of our cruise/tour and Jane picked us up for dinner at her home where were able to get acquainted with her husband Charles Wilkes, their children, Jason and Amy, and her mother Anne (Olmsted) Johnson.
     I’m now back on track for the day assembling files and writing this story to include in the newsletter to be printed and mailed later this week.