Revisit those Ancestors
Update Your Family Tree Sources!
Sometimes we get so focused on looking for new information to discover that we forget that there may be some things missing from the information we'd collected over the years for all of our various ancestors and relatives. So, revisiting can help us better document those we already have in our tree.
This week, while writing about my grandmother, Lovina Hackett Codling, I realized that I had never attached birth certificates for her children. So, I went back and was able to find all but two of them: one for the oldest child, Eugene Edward "Teddy" Codling (b. 1903) and the youngest , my father, Paul Emmitt Codling (b. 1917).
By finding or rediscovering them, there were two things that happened. First, I was reminded that my Uncle Howard's name on his birth certificate was Howard Wayne Codling, though I knew his legal name was Howard Kenneth. Second, I found information that I either overlooked before or just hadn't seen. According to my Aunt Iris's birth certificate, my grandparents seemed to be living apart when she was born in 1906. Also, I realized that the midwife who helped deliver Iris was my great-grandmother, Lovina's mother Emma Hackett.
