Lincoln's birthday

[ELCore]

(01-19-2017 03:10 PM)STS Lincolnite Wrote:  My own grandmother had a sister who died as an infant. She knew nothing about the sister until she happened to visit the graves of her grandparents when she was a young adult. And there was a grave for her sister in the same plot. She told me about that many, many years later and I asked her how she didn't know she had another sister before that. Her response was "well, she died and was gone so nobody talked about her. So how would I know?"

My family suspects that my maternal grandmother had been in a similar situation. My mother had always believed that her mother had two sisters and three brothers, my grandmother being the third child and third girl: all the boys were born later.

I was doing research at Ancestry.com. I was looking for my grandmother's grandfather, whose name I knew to be James. That was her father's name, also. Two James's popped up in the 1910 census for my grandmother's family. At first, I thought her grandfather must have been living with her family at the time. Then, I looked closer, and noticed that the second James was listed as the son of the head of the household, not his father! Further research revealed that he had lived for only 10 months. My grandmother was born the next year.

Nobody in my mother's family remembers my grandmother ever mentioning that an older sibling had died in infancy. And we suspect she never knew. Her older sisters were little children at the time, so they wouldn't remember; and, if the family chose not to talk about it, nobody in my grandmother's generation would have known. We only found out about him because he lived and died in a census year.