52 Ancestors Week 5 2023: Oops

The sun set after 5:00 p.m. for the first time in several months just a few days ago!  This may not sound like a big deal to you if you live closer to the 45th parallel, but we are just below the 49th parallel here in the northwest corner of the United States and it is amazing what that extra few minutes of daylight can do for you.  (If you live in Alaska or Canada or Russia, or even Antarctica, you can stop laughing now.)

This week's prompt is "Oops" and I have to say I have some doozies, mostly on my paternal side.  For one thing, those people kept marrying each other (generally a couple of generations apart) which makes untangling some of those lines challenging.  It is all too easy to mix up who is descended from whom, and how many times.  I just keep praying that no one is too close to their spouse.  But here is an early oops of mine that originated in a transcription error that obfuscated several questionable choices on the part of my ancestors:

My paternal grandfather came from a very small town in Missouri.  His parents seem to have also been born there, and they were first cousins (maybe).  The first time that I saw the transcribed 1910 census though, they called his mother "Lucy Kettion".  Kettion, which should have been Keeton or Keaton, apparently was meant to imply that Jane (Ione) Kettion was her daughter, even though the dates were clearly asynchronous.  It took me forever (it felt like forever anyway) to figure out that Jane Kettion was actually Ione Keeton, my father's half-sister (she and my father share their mother).  The 1910 census itself claims that Ione/Jane is a stepdaughter to the head of household, but in fact she is the stepdaughter of my grandfather who is a son of the head of household.  If I had just looked at the original document rather than accepting the transcription, this would have been clear a lot sooner.  Oops.

So what we have here is a son of the head of household married to a previously married woman who brought a daughter with her when they moved into her second husband's parents' home.  This would have been more obvious if the transcriber had not renamed the wife of the head of household with the new daughter-in-law's former name.  Yikes.  Lucy was really Lucy Prewitt, not Lucy  Kettion/Keeton and Jane was really Ione Keeton.

My head hurts.

A small note:  I visited one of the graveyards in their Missouri town a couple of summers ago and found a lot of Keetons, even quite modern ones, along with a few Prewitts.  I'm going with the Keeton spelling as that seems to be what the family settled on.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

52 Ancestors 2026: Week 6 Favorite Photo

Image
This prompt has come up in previous years which is kind of a gift really because there are a bunch of favorite photos in my possession and I'm happy to have the opportunity to share them!  This year I am especially happy revisit my photographs because just before Christmas a distant, previously unknown, cousin, sent me a bunch of pictures of people in my branch of our family.   These are amazingly high quality, high resolution, black and white, mostly studio portraits plus some more informal photographs.  The absolutely most remarkable thing about them was that nearly all of them were labeled with the names of the subjects.  Putting faces to names I knew, in some cases, since childhood or learned in the course of researching my family history was a true gift. I haven't scanned these photos yet:  I've just photographed a few of them with my phone camera, but I will try to share a couple of them here.  Thank you Cousin K! This adorable tea party is compr...
Read more

52 Ancestors 2026: A Record that Adds Color

Image
Well, I've already missed week one, An Ancestor that I Admire, so I'll just put do a sort of general musing here on the notion of records. Here in the United States, we are lucky that newspapers from previous centuries are full of the social news of towns, large and small.  My family in the U.S. has never exactly been prominent:  we are not good at getting wealthy or holding land or running for office, but one thing my ancestors did was participate in civic life.  My maternal grandmother, Grace McDuff Belknap, apparently registered to vote as soon as she was able (she was born in 1895 in Washington state, where women got the right to vote in 1910.  For many years, she served as an election judge.  But where I found her in the paper was as an officer in the PTA of the local elementary school, finally president.  No one ever mentioned a word about this and I would not have known if the Daily Olympian hadn't made it their business to report all the local news ...
Read more

52 Ancestors 2026: Week 4 "A Theory in Progress" and Week 5 "A Breakthrough Moment"

Image
 Yeah, I never got around to writing week 4, even though I had an idea, because we spent the week trying to stay warm in the middle of a very long, Arctic, cold snap (winter storm Fern) that started with snow that turned to ice.  Our front yard is still under ice, as are our sidewalks because when they ploughed our street they dumped that ice on the sidewalks, thus rendering them impossible to shovel.  We've left our faucets dripping, even during the day, hoping to avoid burst pipes.  I just looked at our energy (gas and electric) bill for the last month and let's just say I am grateful that at least it has no commas.  But, onward! For week 4, I was thinking of writing about my paternal grandmother, Olive (Howdeshell) Keeton Prewitt.  Olive was born in rural Missouri, maybe 30 miles from where my grandfather was living.  Her first husband was Charles Keeton, and from that marriage my 1/2 aunt Ione was born in 1904.  Ollie married my grandfather G....
Read more