So here’s one of my mysteries.

The girl in the middle is Verne. This is the last time she smiled until about the 1970s if the photos I have are anything to go on.

As you might guess given the labels she is surrounded by her mother (Elizabeth, because everyone is Elizabeth. This one is only my Great Great Grandmother. Kaye’s husband’s mother.), her grandmother (Mary Melissa) and her great grandmother, Unknown.

Every website I look at, every newspaper article, every source that I have so far been able to access have Mary Melissa as just a dead end. I have her maiden name however, and the name is a big deal in history of this area. I even have what I suspect are misspelled Census records of her in 1860 the year after she was born. Her last name and her middle name are spelled a myriad of ways, making this all the more complicated.

One of the things about doing this that particularly drives me is the women. Especially this long ago, women had a tendency just to be seen as a vehicle to continue the man’s name and we often don’t even get the luxury of learning a woman’s maiden name. But who they were and where they came from is just as important and just as much part of the history of where their descendants came from. So I’m particularly motivated to find the name of the woman sitting on the left. She’s my Great Great Great Great Grandmother!

I also consider things like no one in this photo was allowed to vote. Sure, Verne is like 9, but she wouldn’t be given the right until she was much older, nor was it a right she grew up just assuming she would have. Elizabeth would die of an illness only a few years after she was allowed to vote. Mary lived until 1945, but her mystery mother? Probably never got to.

So what’s happening now is that I found a booklet that is a lot like the family tree booklet that I have detailing all of Mary’s descendants, including me, but comes down from a man named Christian with Mary’s last name who came from Germany in the 1700s. The problem is is that it exists and it’s closest form in a University Library in the state capital which is several hours away from me. I’ve put in a request with my County Library to see what they can do for me. I feel like this booklet will be the thing that I can use to confirm census info I have on Mary and finally identify her mother.

I have strong reason to believe that this man named Christian is an ancestor of Mary’s and thus an ancestor of mine so I really hopefully can get my hands on a copy somehow.