Asking the Right Questions

erroneous obit

I had reached a stalemate with my family tree - sketchy details with lots of contradictions and unclear relationships.  I started asking questions, and writing them down.  I identified potential sources of information and tested them out. Answering one question led to three more questions.  I am filling up a notebook with questions!  My notebook has tables, and charts, and maps, and lists... organizing the information in a variety of configurations brings up even more questions.  This strategy has given my research such a giant boost, I can't keep up with all the information I'm digging up!

I started with my simplest question:  Was my great grandfather, George Wright Abbott, the son of Gertrude or Sarah?  Records showed Sarah was his mother, but his obituary named Gertrude (his father's first wife).  I knew Gramp Abbott lived with his daughter Miriam when he died - surely she would have known the identity of his mother?  My potential source:  Aunt Teeny (Miriam's daughter).  When I asked, Teeny told me that her mother Miriam had collapsed when Gramp died and was barely able to function much less write an obituary, so the people at Bliley's Funeral Home wrote it.  So there it is:  the obituary is wrong because strangers wrote it.  Mystery solved.  I am confident in saying that Sarah was his mother.

Another question:  Who was Ida Rene's mysterious first husband?  As far as anyone in the family knew, my great grandmother Ida was married only twice - to William B Butler and to George W Abbott. However, the transcription of her marriage record to William Butler gave her name as "Ida Rena [Bryant] Williams."  So who was this Williams guy?  Also, curiously, Ida and William Butler were married in Princess Anne County, though her family was from Southhampton County.  How did she end up in Princess Anne County? This question took me on an adventure to unexpected places.

from Wikipedia:  Princess Anne County in 1895

I decided that the key was with Ida's twin sister Addie.  I started following tangents on her life.  Addie's grandson Charlie Fletcher told me years ago that the family once lived in Princess Anne County, in the Blackwater area.  So maybe this was the connection to the Williams fellow?  Another Ancestry researcher wrote that Eley Bryant, Ida and Addie's father, farmed the "Land of Promise Plantation" in Princess Anne County.  A search on Google maps proved that Land of Promise Road intersects Blackwater Road in what is now Virginia Beach.  This researcher also wrote that Eley was Southern Baptist - the nearest baptist church at the time was located at the corner of Princess Anne Road and....drum roll....Williams Farm Road. Williams?! Could this be the family?  My mother used to buy vegetables from Williams Farm when I was little.  I still haven't identified Ida's first husband, but I'm getting warmer.  The next step is to search the church's records or the Virginia Beach Courthouse records.

Land of Promise-Blackwater - still mostly farms

The Addie tangent led to answers to other questions that I wasn't even asking.  I discovered that she and Blucher moved to Ocean View by 1930.  She and her mentally disabled adult daughter Ruth lived in the same boarding house on Peachtree Street as her son Blucher, his wife Catherine, and their sons Phillip and Charles. This possibly explains why my grandfather Ernie moved from Richmond to Ocean View when he came to Norfolk to look for work - he briefly lived in a boarding house near Addie.  It also ties in with Charlie Fletcher's stories about growing up in Ocean View and remembering my grandfather there.

This tangent led to yet another discovery, one that has been haunting me ever since my son Adam bought a house on Newport Avenue in Norfolk.  Which house on Newport Avenue did my dad live in as a boy? In a search for my grandfather Ernie's address in Ocean View, I stumbled on his address on Newport Ave in a 1952 city directory - there it was - 4306.

"Gramp" standing in front of 4306 Newport Ave in 1954.

4306 Newport Ave today