My 2nd-great-grandfather Jacob Dennis Mayberry, widowed in 1917, desired a fresh start. In 1919, he purchased a 440-acre farm in Chilton County, Alabama, 24 miles northeast of his former residence in Bibb County. He built a large and rambling house around the old cabin that stood there. His daughter, Clara, her husband, Otha Payne, and their baby, Clara Thomas Payne (my grandmother), and his unmarried daughter Mary Thomas Mayberry moved with him to the new place. And on this property, they all lived out the rest of their lives, though you would not know that by a basic family tree.
Mary lived barely a year more, dying upright in her chair at age 41, and was buried back in Bibb County. For my grandmother, this farm in Dry Valley was the only home she ever remembered. She and her husband Ollis Edwin (Jack) Harrell raised their five daughters there, in a four-room cabin up the hill from “the Big House,” to which she returned when her husband and mother died. And we, her grandchildren, spent a week there every summer, and joined our cousins for all of the holidays in this wonderful old house.
To look at the born-died “bookends” that genealogy tends to give many a person, though, the Dry Valley farm in Chilton County would be missing from the story. My grandmother’s bookend history looks like this:
Clara Thomas Payne Harrell
1918: born in Bibb County, Alabama
2000: died in Jefferson County, Alabama
Life is what happens between the bookends, though, right? If you are more diligent and add in the places of residence that the decennial censuses offer, Chilton County enters the story. It would look like this:
Clara Thomas Payne Harrell
1918: born in Bibb County, Alabama
1920: resided in Chilton County, Alabama
1930: resided in Chilton County, Alabama
1940: resided in Chilton County, Alabama
2000: died in Jefferson County, Alabama
While it brings Chilton County, her real home, into the story, a person hoping to turn this into the standard paragraph for a family history is liable to write something like this:
Clara Thomas Payne Harrell was born in Bibb County in 1918 and moved soon after that to Chilton County. Sometime after 1940, she moved to Jefferson County, where she died in 2000.
And that’s where the story falls apart. She never moved to Jefferson County. She just died there.
How did that happen? She died at UAB Hospital, which is in Jefferson County. The same situation can occur with births.
When dealing with rural ancestors, even those who lived before hospitals were prevalent, always consider that they might have been born or died away from home. A pregnant woman’s husband, with a crop to sow or harvest, could not be near her constantly, awaiting the moment she needed help. The mother-to-be might have gone to the home of her mother or a sister in another county to await the birth.
The same could be true of the ancestor who was nearing death. He or she might have been transported to the home of a child or other family member to be cared for in the last days. Increasingly in the 20th century, people were taken to the hospital to die. The hospital might have been a county or two away from your ancestor’s home. Both of my grandmother’s parents also died outside Chilton County. The closest hospital to them at the time was the Shelby Memorial Hospital in the adjoining Shelby County. Their genealogical “bookends” also completely overlook the place they lived most of their days.
Be careful of the born-died bookends and the faulty conclusions they can inspire. If all you have on your ancestors is the when and where of birth and death, write family history carefully. Do not suggest they lived where they were born and/or died, unless you know it to be true. For unfortunately, your writing becomes someone else’s “documented source.”
Call to Action
If an ancestor appears to have been born or died where no census or other document places them, ask yourself where the nearest hospital was when the person appears to have been born or died. You may find clues by searching newspapers in the area. Check city directories. See if records have survived from the state medical association or public health departments at the county and state level that offer the location of hospitals and clinics.
And of course, if you are lucky enough to find a birth or death certificate, you will most likely have the home address of the ancestor there. Pay attention to a distance between the place of the birth or death and the place of living. It may offer new insights on the first or the last chapter of your ancestor’s story.
As always, I encourage you to comment on your own experiences with misleading life bookends in your research. Please share this with anyone you believe will be interested. And if you are not yet on my mailing list, I encourage you to join, using one of the forms available on this page.
Gathering Zotero References for a Bibliography
In Zotero, you can quickly make a bibliography of sources you have consulted in your writing. Copy them all into a collection (folder) in Zotero. Select them all, right-click, and choose “Create bibliography from items.” Select your citation style, choose the bibliography “Output Mode” and “Copy to Clipboard” before clicking OK. Then go to your document and paste from the clipboard. Depending on the writing software you are using, it may paste the items in a paragraph form. But in most cases, it will paste them in alphabetical order by author, in a list with hanging indents, like this:
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Excellent points made, especially about the death places.
Thanks, Henry!
What you say about the bookends is so true. The commonsense test needs to be applied when looking at birth & death & census dates. I have a relative that appears twice in the 1841 Census. I think she left her place of residence to help “nurse” a dying relative, who passed away a few days after the census. It would have been easy to assume that she “moved” to the second farm and then moved back to the original farm before the 1851 census. Once I realised that the relative had died and possibly why she was there it all made sense.
It’s good to be reminded to look carefully at the data and not jump to conclusions!
Thank you, Sandra. Your story reminds me of two brothers in my tree who show up in their parents’ census household in Alabama and with their own families across the Georgia line in the same year. I wonder if they went home (less than 30 miles away) to help their parents with a harvest or something.
The bookends of my son’s life will not tell the true story for future researchers as he died in a hospital 2 hours from where his life story actually existed. Never thought of it in this manner so now will ensure his story is well documented for family researchers.
I am so sorry to hear about your son, Cynthia. Thank you for sharing.
Cynthia, my condolences on the loss of your son.
My story is similar, my father died at a hospital 2-1/2 hours away from where he lived. HIs father died in Arizona in a veterans home during WWII; the family resided in Oroville, California. I had documented all of Dad’s various moves through his life and military service in his obituary but had not considered putting it into my genealogy program since I “knew” this. It’s a good reminder that what we “know” is lost when we die if we don’t write it down for our descendants.
So true!
Donna,
I’m so glad that I stumbled across your original article about geohistory at the Alabama Heritage website. Who knew I was already a genohistorian! Your approach on family genealogy research for the “armchair” genealogist is a breathe of fresh air. It energizes me to take up my past work, dust it off, and start afresh.
Thank you!
Melanie Barksdale
Melanie, I only just noticed that I left your comment unanswered more than a year ago. So sorry for the oversight. Thank you very much for your feedback. I have been away from blogging while working on new products, and you inspire me to get back to what I love so much! Thank you!