Week 10 of the 52ancestors challenge: Females

I am trying to catch up!  The whole month of March in fact is themed "Females" but this first week is specifically aimed at women.  I've already written about the women in my line, at least my maternal line.  My father's line is a little harder as my father was not exactly estranged but had drawn some pretty firm boundaries between himself and his family of origin.  Nonetheless, the Prewitts and the people they married left a lot of traces in the records so they are not entirely mysterious.  My husband's family on the other hand has long looked impossible.  There were plenty of stories from his mother's family (complicated by second marriages and people referred to as cousins who had no genetic relationship at all) but his father's side has long been a puzzle, despite some hints of Alsatian origin.  What broke the logjam was one of those little shaky leaves from Ancestry attached to an aunt with a different last name.

Ancestry sends emails with several hints in them every so often, and this time one of the hints was about my husband's father's half-sister.  Aunt Marie and my father-in-law had the same mother, but different fathers.  Marie was the elder, and her surname was Scanlon.  The hint led me back to the 1930 census which lists the household 16 year old Marie was living in with her step-father Louis Doerflinger 42, mother Catherine 43, and brothers Louis 8, Eugene 7, and William 5.  I had seen this census before but I apparently only looked at the names and dismissed the whole thing because it had renamed Louis the younger, Eugene (my father-in-law) and William as Scanlons.  It was an easy transcription mistake to make since their names were listed under Marie's and the census taker had just drawn a dash for the last name as if they were all Scanlons rather than Doerflingers (I guess the thought was that people would assume that they had the same name as the head of household).  And now I read across the rest of the form to see what else I had missed.  Sure enough, Louis the elder's parents were listed as having been born in Alsace-Lorraine, language at home: French.  

This also answered a question about the spelling of Doerflinger:  If it had started out as a German name, it would originally have been spelled with an umlaut over the "o" and the more likely American spelling would have been Dorflinger.  But the modern Alsatian Doerflingers we have met spell their name the same way we do, and now it looks like that is how Louis's family of origin spelled it too.

And one last point:  this really illustrated why you should go back when you get stuck and look at records you've already seen.  I had gotten so hung up on the mistake over the boys' surname that I never bothered to look at the rest of the information collected in that census.  Aunt Marie, who was a very nice woman, led me back to some important facts.  I'm sure she'd be glad to know she helped!