I'll try to consistently refer to my relationships, like my father or my great-grandmother, and you can work out how it relates to you.
Eventually there will be a book that I can publish on-line in pdf format so that you can view it or print it. I'll organize and fill in as much as I can, but you're welcome to collaborate if you have information or images. In the meantime I will blog sporadically when I come across things I think are interesting so the information gets shared. Expect my blog posts to be filled with digressions as things cross my mind, and feel to free to skip ahead, but I'll try to keep it readable.
Some of our ancestors are easier to research than others. U.S. Census data is available from the first one in 1790 to 1940. Detailed census information isn't released until 70 years after the census because it is assumed that most of the people listed, especially the adults who may have given detailed information, will be dead by then. U.S. military service data up to WWII is readily available, as are Veterans Administration information. I know more about a couple of our Revolutionary War ancestors than anyone one else of that era because they applied for pensions beginning in 1820 and had to give detailed testimony of their service and their current financial status.
As of now I have documented information on all of my grandparents, two of whom I didn't know existed until I was in my twenties, and all but one of my great-grandparents. A few tidbits from the previous couple of generations that you may not know:
Grandpa Mullens name was Jacob Carl Mullens in all of the official documents before he left home. The1930 census was the first that he would have reported himself, and he became Carl Jacob Mullens and remained that way the rest of his life. My Dad said he hated Jacob and would never use it. He also reported in the 1930 census that he was unable to read and write. In conversations with my Dad he said that by the time he was aware Grandpa could read and write, although Grandma would sometimes read things aloud for him. That was a bit of a problem at silent movies when she'd read the subtitles out loud to him while the audience was trying to shush her. But Grandpa was just following the family tradition. His father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great grandfather were illiterate as well. Before then there isn't enough information to know. And as I've told most of you, our last name was spelled Mullins until my great-grandfather, George Washington Mullens. There's no way of telling whether the change was intentional or the result of clerical error somewhere that was then repeated.
Currently the biggest gaps are in Grandma Mullens ancestors. Finding information on Grandma Bane isn't too difficult from 1920 on, but we know her first husband, who was Grandma Mullens father, was named Warmouth or Warmuth and he was born in Illinois and nothing else. Grandma Bane's maiden name is Wheeler and I can find a fair amount on her father, but very little on her mother.
My mother's story is complicated, especially for those of us who knew her family. Her parents were Samuel Vance Crabtree and Anna Ruth Alger. They married sometime in 1933 in Richmond, IN. In September of 1933 Sam was arrested in New Castle, IN for manslaughter. Anna was several months pregnant at the time. On November 29, 1933 my mother was born in Richmond. On January 1, 1934 Anna died from smallpox, and by then Sam had been tried and sentenced to 7 years in prison. Mom's grandmother, Hazel Leland Alger Beck, and her husband Judson Beck adopted her. Hazel and Judson had met at an orphanage in Ohio where both of them had placed their children after they lost their spouses and were left with small children. They had both taken jobs there to be near their children, fallen in love, married and eventually formed a blended family by the 1930 census.
It took me a long time to find out more about Sam Crabtree than old newspaper stories about his original arrest and imprisonment and then his escape from prison and recapture three years later. Although he lived the last half of his life quietly in Ohio, he was originally from Tennessee, a little town called Pall Mall east of Nashville near the Kentucky line. The next thing that caught my eye is that his mother's maiden name was Crabtree. It turned out that her husband was her uncle's grandson. Legal, but unusual.
