Following the leads

Following the leads

In my last blog I gave a link to an Adventure in Family Tree.  I still have not fully resolved the situation, but it led me to do some things that I will document here. 

I decided to find Ginny Chestnut as she was the daughter of Alyce, my uncle’s second wife.  I vaguely remembered her name, but on Alyce’s obituary she is listed as living in Redding, California.  Ginny was the product of Alyce’s first marriage.  I went to Dexknows.com and hoped that I would find a phone number for her.  I was successful in my search and placed my call.  All I got was a voice mail.  I usually do not leave a message when calling people that I do not know, but in this case I did.  Ginny has a photography business, so when she got my voice mail she returned my call.  I introduced myself and she remembered my parents and my uncles and aunts.  I asked her if she knew of any one in her family by the name of Amy Lynn Schmidt and she responded that she did not know of any one by that name. 

We talked for a while and I got some information from her.  Alyce, her mother, was a product of a marriage that had ten children.  The mother (Gertrude) died 2 months after the death of her tenth child of a ruptured appendix and gall bladder.  Ginny also gave me her e-mail address so that we could correspond.  She also told me that all of Alyce’s siblings were dead. In addition she told me that the parents were born in Sweden and were of the servant class and that their name was Benard or Bernard or some other Swedish variant. 

Armed with this information, I decided to do a little searching of the records.  In the census records, I found August as a single young man in the household of William Nicholson in the 1900 census living in Nebraska where he is listed a Benard.  I found a marriage record in the Nebraska marriages where he is listed as Nels August Bernard.  If you do a search on one spelling of the name, you may not find who you are searching for.  Thus in my earlier searches I missed the record where he was listed as a single 19 year old, because I searched on Bernard.

From the marriage record, I learned that Gertrude Bernard’s maiden name was Johnson and she was born in Sweden.  In the 1920 census we find NA Bernard with his wife Gertrude and six children listed; Herbert, Hazel, Fern(e), Francis, Dorothy and Harold.  In the 1940 census only August is listed, because Gertrude died in 1923.  He was living in Omaha, Nebraska at the time, but in 1935 he was still in Rural, Knox, Nebraska and listed a N A Bernard. The children were not in the home.  I then looked for each of the children.  I found Ferne Bernard in the Social Security Death Index, I found Dorothy Benard in the 1940 census living with Carmen, Alice (note the spelling) and Herbert living in Omaha, Nebraska. From this information I was able to calculate approximate birth years for each of the children.  I still only had eight of the ten children.  I will have to ask Ginny who the others were.  I entered all the information in my descendants of Lysander Gee database.  From here I can move them to any database that I wish.

In my e-mail correspondence with Ginny I decided to share some histories that I had on my computer of my uncle Vernon.  I had one written by his brother Merrill and also one written by his mother. In addition I had histories of each of Vernon’s brothers written by their mother and I sent them as well.  Inasmuch as these histories were not posted as Stories on Family Tree, I added them to Family Tree.

This is not the end of the story.  Ginny told me that she had a cookbook with family history that she would share with me, but she was selling the family home and moving and that it might be some time before she could do that.

Stay tuned for further developments.