Information learned in Tennessee Part 1 – ♦Intro and Warning♦
I have always wanted to know more about my dad. One of the big things I had always been curious about was where his clearly part Cherokee looks came from and what the original name of the family had been. If I can discover any of this information I would like it to live on after I’m no longer around to talk about it so I will be posting my discoveries here.
Warning to family members
I need to warn family readers that I found some information related to a story my mom had shared with me that is potentially upsetting. I only knew to look because of what mom told me. If ignorance is bliss do not read Part 4. The other sections don’t contain anything that should ruffle anyone’s feathers.
Ancestry.com
I started with internet research until I hit a wall and couldn’t figure out anything more.
I have a love/hate relationship with ancestry.com. I love the information you can glean from the site but find their monthly fees completely outrageous. I got a 14 day trial membership and beat the website to death for two weeks and didn’t store anything there.
1940 Census released April 3, 2012
The census provided the big kick in the right direction when I finally found dad after checking about 200 pages in Campbell County Tennessee. I about jumped up and down with joy since I was beginning to think it was hopeless that I would ever find him.
I have the .tiff scans of the original pages from ancestry.com as well as the images from the 1940 Census. The census pages are very large and you need a high resolution image to be able to read all the little print and hand-writing. The images are 14 to 18 MB — if anyone is interested in seeing them I would be happy to copy them to disk and send them in the mail. I can also put them on cubby.com so they can be downloaded.
The beginning of discoveries
With the information from the census I found an obituary for one of dad’s half brothers Clay Smith. The surprise on this find was that dad’s half brother had lived in Toledo and worked at Champion Spark Plug yet I’d never heard a word about him. The obituary referenced both parents and both brothers as preceding him in death so Clay was aware that dad had died.
The obituary also gave me the names of both parents. Do you believe it? John and Jane Smith. That should make the search easier (*sarcasm*). I started searching for the marriage of the parents with no success and wondered if they were common law and not legally married.
It looked like Clay’s wife might still be alive and I wondered if she would talk to me and if she knew anything about her husband’s childhood. She was his second wife that he had married in Toledo so it was hard telling how much he might have talked about things that far in the past.
Trip Scheduled
At this point I felt I was stuck and needed to be on the ground in Tennessee to learn any more so I scheduled a trip there from April 30 to May 5.