A fellow researcher emailed me to ask for help finding
his gr-grandmother, Ellen Potratz’s death information. (The name had been
spelled Nellie Potrax on her wedding certificate.) His grandfather, Ellen’s son, was born in
June, 1903. The researcher had found her husband’s second marriage certificate dated
in 1904. He assumed Ellen died between those two dates, especially because in
her brother’s 1910 death notice, she was listed as his late sister.
He had thoroughly looked in all the right places: Illinois and Cook County death indexes, findagrave.com,
newspaper death notices, and the Cook County Catholic cemetery kiosk
index. He’d even gone to Cook County to
see if they could find it for him. This
researcher asked if I could meet with him and give him some more resources.
Instead, I decided to first poke around on the internet
and within an hour, in the Cook County death index, I found an Ellen Poster who
died on July 4, 1903. The address where
she died was given, the birth place was correct. Calvary was listed as the cemetery. I emailed the researcher and he wrote back
within minutes. Yes! It was her!
The address was correct. He searched
findagrave.com and found her listed as Ellen Potrx, buried in Calvary,
with the same death date, a few days after her son’s birth. Within
a couple of hours, I’d found her information, which he’d been looking for years.
I emailed him one more time that day but did not receive a
reply, which was rather unusual. Several
days later he wrote that he and his wife, immediately got in their car and
drove to the cemetery to find her burial place!
He was so kind in thanking me for my help in finding her.
This is a lesson from which we can all learn. When your
research is “stuck”, one solution is to reach out to another researcher. In
this case, the problem was the variation of the spelling of the surname. Potratz, Potrax, Poster or Potrx were the
names listed on various legal documents.
A second set of eyes may find something that is hiding in
plain sight.
No comments:
Post a Comment