Taking A Second Glance …
May 16th, 2008 by kenopoly
Well, tonight I was going through some of my records and trying to make sure I had everything tidied up and neat but while doing so I learned something new. I thought I would share it with you as it is a learning experience for me.
I keep all my documentation in a “Surname” folder and have sub-folders under it for “Birth Records”, “Death Records”, “Marriage Records”, etc… Tonight, while sorting through it all I found a text file called “Spangler Notes” and opened it up to check it out! It was a gold-mine of information for me. It’s last modified date was 4-4-2007 but it was created on 7-26-2006! I’ve had this file for almost 2 years and let it slip into the cracks and become forgotten!
What did it contain? It was a copy of a message board post from 2001. My sister had inquired about some Spanglers in Red River Co., Texas and the responder was posting what she had from a Red River Cemetery book. She had the month and year that my grandfather’s first wife died. She had an article about a third child that was born to this marriage that I had never heard of. The child was born in 1913 and died in 1918. I looked it up in the Texas Deaths, 1890-1976 database at Family Search Labs and found the death certificate info with the parents name on it to confirm this was correct. The record at Family Search Labs had the birth and death dates on it also.
There were also a few other names mentioned. I knew some but didn’t know others. It’s not anything that is going to tear down a brick wall but it confirms that there were more children born to the union than I thought! It also tells where they are buried although they don’t have stones!
The lesson to be learned here is to make sure you do occasionally go back and review some of what you have already downloaded and make sure you took the time to read it all. I imagine that this is something I received when I first started my research and was just stockpiling as much info as possible and not really documenting as I went!
It pays to make sure you read every note, reference and such that you have. What if this would have been info that would have helped me to break through a brick wall?
Lesson learned!!!
