Week 3 Favorite Photo and Week 4 Curious of the #52ancestors challenge for 2022

I'm going to skip lightly over week three:  I have posted a lot of photos in the past and nothing new has come to light recently.  Week 4 may be more of a challenge.  The theme is "Curious" and, as usual, any hints about how to approach this topic is open-ended to a fault!  The three stories that Amy featured in her email for that week mostly had to do with the curiosity of the modern genealogist, looking for answers to incomprehensible family stories or trying to find someone who really should have been in the census (one turned out to involve terrible trauma and the other was a transcription error).  And now that I think about it, I have had my own fun with transcription errors, not to mention intentional obfuscation.

My father's family has always been a bit of a mystery to me.  I know from what little he said, and from what my mother told me, that his life as a child was not happy, and he left home very young to go to work.  He did finish high school in spite of that, graduating in 1933.  I knew that he had a half-sister, Ione, who was significantly older than he was, and that Ione had been married several times but never had children.  Her last husband was named Albert Casto--I even met Albert once--but all other names were lost to history at that point.  All I knew about Ione's antecedents was that she was the daughter of my grandmother, Olive Howdeshell, nothing about her father.

I know I should have taken notes on this because the sequence of events is now totally blurry to me.  However, at least in broad outlines, I managed to contact someone who knew about the Howdeshell side, probably through Ancestry, and she referred me to the Howdeshell tree on tribalpages.com where I found the name of my grandmother's first husband, Charles Keeton, who was Ione's father.  This solved another mystery which had my great grandmother being the mother of Ione on the 1910 census (not sure why that happened since Ione's parents were clearly married, even if Ione was now living with the family of her soon-to-be stepfather):  they had spelled this totally misplaced name as Kettion, not to mention the census taker's handwriting had led the transcriber to turn Ione into Jane.  Yikes.

The Keetons clearly existed however:  I visited the Star Hope Cemetery in Elsberry Missouri last summer and the place was full of the Keeton name.  I didn't find Charles but many of his family members were there (and a few of my Prewitt family members too).  It was curiosity that led me to Howdeshell page on tribalpages.com, and it was curiosity that led me to that cemetery.  There are more questions but that that is what curiosity is for, isn't it?