{"id":725,"date":"2018-06-14T12:09:13","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T16:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/?p=725"},"modified":"2018-06-14T12:13:31","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T16:13:31","slug":"im-nancy-drew-is-how-i-did-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/?p=725","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m Nancy Drew, Is How I Did It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/?p=722\">Yesterday&#8217;s post<\/a> has generated an interesting conversation on Facebook, so I&#8217;m going to write a little post here about how I did the research. [Also, for the record: I&#8217;m blurring a lot of stuff for now because some of these people are still alive, and just reasons. But I have the info, and I&#8217;m relatively confident in my assertions and will note when that&#8217;s not the case.]<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/007-Stevens-Point-Back-2-407x640-e1528910599722.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-717 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/007-Stevens-Point-Back-2-407x640-e1528910599722-300x191.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"191\" srcset=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/007-Stevens-Point-Back-2-407x640-e1528910599722-300x191.jpg 300w, https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/007-Stevens-Point-Back-2-407x640-e1528910599722.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the card I had to start with.<\/p>\n<p>The information I had for sure was:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The author&#8217;s initials (H.E.)<\/li>\n<li>The author resided in Stevens Point in 1922<\/li>\n<li>The recipient&#8217;s address, at a rural route and box number in a township in Wisconsin about 90 miles away from Stevens Point<\/li>\n<li>The recipient&#8217;s marital status and a very, very vague guess at her name (it looked like her first name started with E and her last with either R or K)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Things I concluded that were probably, but not definitely, facts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>H.E. was old enough to have married and moved out<\/li>\n<li>H.E. grew up in the place her mother continued to live and therefore would have been on older census\/other records<\/li>\n<li>H.E. had a sister named Marie<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I started out learning about the rural route, where it was, and if it had any other names (they often do). I like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.historicmapworks.com\/\">Historic Map Works<\/a> as a source for old maps, but in this case they didn&#8217;t help all that much. So it was off to the 1920 and 1910 Census data I went. I love <a href=\"https:\/\/stevemorse.org\/census\/unified.html\">Steve Morse&#8217;s Enumeration District tools <\/a>&#8212; he&#8217;s done the world an incredible favor with that page, and I&#8217;ve used it more than once to solve family mysteries. (His other research tools are impressive, too.) Basically, you use city\/state data to figure out which pages of the census cover your areas. It&#8217;s still a lot of needle-in-haystack digging, but it takes it down to one haystack instead of a field full of them.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_727\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/4454979_00065.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-727\" class=\"wp-image-727 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/4454979_00065-300x197.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"197\" srcset=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/4454979_00065-300x197.jpg 300w, https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/4454979_00065-768x503.jpg 768w, https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/4454979_00065-1024x671.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/4454979_00065.jpg 1479w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-727\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">1910 Census for Family K.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>So this was the long slog part of the research. I just started guessing. I worked through the relevant enumeration districts in the 1920 census, looking for families with last names starting with R or K, mothers&#8217; names starting with E, and possibly daughters with initials H.E. or named Marie. I didn&#8217;t find any. So I started comparing families in the area in 1920 to families in the area in 1910, thinking that maybe H.E. and Marie had moved out before 1920.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Erdmann-Obit2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-728 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Erdmann-Obit2-148x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"148\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Erdmann-Obit2-148x300.jpg 148w, https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Erdmann-Obit2.jpg 314w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 148px) 100vw, 148px\" \/><\/a>Every time I found a potential family, I did a quick family tree research session for them to see what I could find. For example, if I found Leon Rutabaga and his wife Emily living on Highway 6 in 1910 with daughters Harriett and Marie, I then tried to find marriage records for a Harriett Rutabaga to a man who lived in Stevens Point by 1922. It&#8217;s a complicated back-and-forth between census records, city directories (Stevens Point &#8212; not their rural township!), and even newspaper records.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I found them. I got lucky, and they lived in the exact same place in both 1910 and 1920, so I could determine that Louis K. and his wife Emma had four kids in the 1910 census, and only two in 1920 &#8212; Helen and Mary had moved out by then.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/MM-Small.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-730 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/MM-Small-300x226.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"226\" srcset=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/MM-Small-300x226.jpg 300w, https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/MM-Small.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So then I had a last name to work with, and things really sped up. I quickly found Helen K.&#8217;s obituary, which was extremely helpful. And from there it was just a downhill Ancestry.com project to fill out the whole family history. This town and this era has a lot online, so I was even able to find a picture of little Mildred Marie.<\/p>\n<p>Interesting side note: this picture also includes my great-aunt Jeannette. So that&#8217;s two postcards off eBay that ended up tying into my own family!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday&#8217;s post has generated an interesting conversation on Facebook, so I&#8217;m going to write a little post here about how I did the research. [Also, for the record: I&#8217;m blurring a lot of stuff for now because some of these &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/?p=725\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-postcards"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/007-Stevens-Point-Back-2-407x640-e1528910599722.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6y0gZ-bH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=725"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":733,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions\/733"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}