Friday, June 21, 2013

Family History Friday # 11 - Measure Twice, Cut Once

   We recently changed our internet provider back to Comcast. Our experience with satellite internet through Wild Blue did not turn out well. We had to pay to get out of the contract. That seems so wrong. You pay for a service which turns out to be very poor. Then when you terminate the service early, because it was so poor, you have to pay a termination fee. Wild Blue's service was so poor that I would guess that the early termination fees are the only way they are staying afloat. It made genealogy work particularly miserable.  It was so nice yesterday to work in Family Search and not have to spend so much time waiting for documents to load.

    The family I was working on yesterday was the William P. Darrah family, in particular his daughter Luamy. I'm in the process of going through the family group sheet of each of his children and adding sources. It is a bit of a tedious job but it makes the original source material readily available to other family members. Let me put in a plug here for doing family history research carefully and thoroughly, as noted in the title above. It is so much easier to get it right the first time, than it is to fix things later.

    Luamy Darrah married Daniel M. Zimmer, a farmer, on  April 16, 1865 in Appanoose County, Iowa.  They had five children. The oldest child was a daughter named Victoria who was born on March 15, 1866 and died on August 21, 1871.  I can well imagine the sorrow felt by a young mother on losing her five year old daughter. They had four sons who lived to adulthood. According to the 1900 census she only had the five children, three of whom were still living at the time of the census.  Luamy, her husband, Daniel, their daughter, Victoria, and two sons, Samuel M. and J. William, are all buried in the Shaeffer Cemetery, located north of Mystic, Iowa. Luamy Darrah was born in Monongalia County, Virginia (now West Virginia) on February 14, 1847.  Her family moved to Appanoose County, Iowa in the early 1860s when Luamy was a teenager.  After that, it appears that she lived the rest of her life in Appaoose County.

    In family search, Luamy Darrah's maiden name is spelled Dariah, which was the way it was indexed from the marriage record. Having seen the actual marriage record in the Appanoose County Courthouse, I can assure you that the indexer made an error. It was spelled Luamy Darrah on the original marriage record, but I'm not sure how I go about fixing that. Also in family search two of her sons are listed twice and one of her daughters-in-law (Belle) is listed as her daughter. I suspect someone made the assumption that all of the Zimmers buried in the Schaeffer cemetery were the children of Daniel and Luamy Zimmer. I guess I need a little training on how to fix errors in Family Search,

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