Do you ever go off on tangents with your genealogy research? If so, welcome to the club!
I often go off on tangents with my FAN club. For the past several months, I've been on one of those tangents -- researching the descendants of James Crawford and Rebecca Anderson Maxwell Crawford.
My most recent quest involves the descendants of Cynthia Crawford and John Crafton. This family is elusive! Born between 1824 and 1832, their children include John S., Barzilla, Patrick H, Rachel and Mary I. Even though I have approximate birth dates for all of the children, I only have a death date for John S. Crafton.
This past week, I've been investigating the family of Mary I Crafton who married Jacob Cole in Indiana in 1865. According to Find a Grave, Jacob Cole died in 1893 in Ouachita County Arkansas. In an attempt to learn more about Mary Crafton Cole, I started investigating the Arkansas branch of the family thru their son James Franklin Cole.
Since I didn't know a lot about this family, I used connections on Find a Grave to identify the family. From the Find a Grave memorial for
James Franklin Cole, I learned his wife was Elizabeth Francis Holt. I also was able to identify 3 of the children: Harvey E Cole, James Dewitt Cole and Ora Mae Cole.
When working with a 'new' family, I also use the FamilySearch tree to see what other researchers have concluded. Based on the location of his birth and death and his wife's name, I matched James Franklin Cole in my RootsMagic database to
James Franklin Cole (1866-1952) [L164-8WB]. Since FamilySearch had two additional children, Herbert Lee Cole and Roy J Cole, I added them to the family.
My next step was to locate information to support the family configuration obtained via Find a Grave and FamilySearch. Ancestry hints to census records provided support for the family configuration.
However, none of this provided a tie between James Franklin Cole of Arkansas and the Cole family in Clay County, Indiana. That's when I turned to newspapers to try and locate obituaries for the Cole family in Ouachita County, Arkansas.
So far, I haven't found any obituaries. However, I did find one of those 'gossipy' tidbits that provides a major clue. According to the gossip,
Mr. and Mrs. Roy Cole of Conroe, Texas visited Mr. and Ms. J. D. Cole and Mrs. J. F. Cole Friday.
Local News,
The Camden News (Camden, Arkansas), 13 December 1956, page 12; digital images,
Newspapers.com (www.newspapers.com : viewed online November 2019).
That little tidbit not only provides a location for the family of Roy Cole in 1956 but also indicates that his mother, Mrs. J. F. Cole, is still living.
