52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week # 42 theme is "Lost".
As we build our family trees, we try to find and add the census records for every direct ancestor, looking at all the household members and neighbors too. But in searching for my Grandpa, Charley, in 1900, I do not find him. Another LOST relative. By 1906 he married my Grandma in Oklahoma, and we have seen the marriage certificate. Someone had passed along a comment that "Charley went off and worked at a livery stable somewhere." I believe he was saving up $ to get married and to buy land from a relative who homesteaded in Oklahoma. So, a few years later, we were following the lives of a previous generation. An uncle of Charley had gone to Colorado a few years earlier, and a cousin went to the gold fields of Central City, Colorado. (Sounds like a good place to save up $$ for coming marriage, huh?) The 1900 census for Cousin Ed, shows him in Central City as a "Hack Man". Could that be like a livery stable? I think that my Grandpa Charley was not LOST at all but was caught between census records, and had indeed "gone off and worked at a livery stable", before coming back to get married. Among the unidentified pictures collected over time, we found this one which we thought was Cousin Ed with his children and pups. Sure enough, a distant cousin identified the picture as his relative who was Edgar from Colorado. So besides finding our "Lost" Grandpa, we found Cousin Ed, who wasn't lost at all.