Monday's Diggings

What Grandma Knew About Her Family

Did you ever have to create a family tree as a child? Or perhaps you have inherited a family tree or family information written down by a parent or grandparent.

Today’s digging is a little different from the courthouse records, newspaper clippings, census records, and other documents that usually fill my genealogy files. It is a simple handwritten family sheet created by my grandmother, Pauline E. Mentzer Briles.

At the top of the page, Pauline recorded her own name, birth date and marriage date. Below that are spaces for information about her parents and grandparents.

What makes this piece of paper particularly interesting to me is its appearance.

It clearly wasn't completed all at once. Some information is written in blue ink, while other entries appear to have been added in pencil. Even the blue ink isn't all the same. There are also corrections, additions, and plenty of blank spaces.

In other words, this doesn't look like someone sitting down with a completed genealogy and neatly copying the information onto a form. Instead, it looks like a document that evolved over time.

What Pauline Knew

Pauline knew the basics of her own life, of course, and she identified her parents as Nettie Wells Mentzer and Charles O. Mentzer.

When she reached her grandparents, however, the information became much more limited.

On her mother's side, she recorded the surname Wells, identified her grandmother's maiden name as Salomie Crandell, and recorded her grandfather as Thurston Wells. On her father's side, she identified her grandmother as Emma and her grandfather as George.

But many of the spaces for dates and places were left blank.

Those blanks may be the most interesting part of the entire document.

A Clue in the Ink

One entry on the sheet initially appears to be incorrect. The death date for Pauline's father, Charles O. Mentzer, is followed by the place Illinois. Charles died in Kansas, not Illinois.

However, a closer look at the document provides another possibility.

The death date and "Illinois" are written in a different blue ink from much of the original information on the form. That suggests those details may have been added at a different time.

I also know from personal experience that in her later years Grandma sometimes mixed up dates and places associated with family events. Because of that, I suspect that Illinois was intended as Charles O. Mentzer's birthplace rather than his place of death.

I can't prove that was what she intended, but it makes more sense than assuming she believed her father died in Illinois.

And that little discrepancy is part of what makes this document valuable. It isn't simply a collection of genealogical facts. It is evidence of one person's knowledge and memory.

The Value Is in the Blanks

When I first look at a document like this, my genealogist's instinct is to compare every name, date, and place with my database. I want to determine what is right, what is wrong, and what is missing.

But perhaps that isn't the most important thing this document has to tell me.

Today, I know quite a bit about these families. I have records that allow me to trace Pauline's Mentzer, Wells, and Crandell ancestry well beyond the information recorded on this sheet.

Pauline apparently did not.

This simple piece of paper provides a glimpse into what my grandmother knew about her own family history—or, perhaps more importantly, what she didn't readily know.

We sometimes forget how dramatically genealogy research has changed. Today I can search census records, newspapers, vital records, cemetery databases, digitized books, land records, and countless other collections without leaving home. Pauline didn't have those tools at her fingertips. Learning the birth or death place of a grandparent might have required asking a relative, writing a letter, visiting a courthouse, or simply hoping that someone in the family remembered.

And perhaps that is why I find the blank spaces on this family sheet so fascinating.

They aren't simply places where information is missing. They help document the limits of family knowledge at the time Pauline was filling out the sheet.

The names she wrote down tell me something about my ancestors.

The blanks—and even the possible mistakes—tell me something about my grandmother.

And that makes this simple handwritten sheet a family history treasure in its own right.