G-Pa Tom Update #7: Neva's Death Certificate.

Well I got the death certificate in the mail, and to my surprise/dismay it didn't list Neva's husband's name. It does however say "Widowed," so that tells me he passed first (obviously). Any little clue helps. Turns out Neva died at her place of residence: Chandler Convalescent Hospital.

Instead of a husband's name, as the 'Informant' it lists a daughter's name, Patricia Russell (apparently my grandfather's step-sister). The address of her home is also in Glendale; where Neva died.

The thought crossed my mind to go and visit this address to see if Mrs. Russell's family still lives there. That way I can get a ton more information, and that would seriously make my day. However Neva died in 1980; that's 31 years ago. Chances are slim the family is still living there.

Plus I don't know how weird it would be if some 6'6 tall stranger showed up asking questions about their family.

Unfortunately, unless I actually do that, I have no more leads. I have absolutely no idea how to figure out what "Hammond" Neva married. At first I thought about visiting the hospital where Neva lived, but again, it was 31 years ago and I'm not sure how far back the patient records go. Plus I called there already and the lady I talked to didn't really understand what I was asking and told me, "Try calling our North Hollywood location."

Thanks, Esquella.

G-Pa Tom Update #6: MISSION (almost) ACCOMPLISHED!!

I've done it... I've actually done it. So excited...

I received Thomas's birth certificate in the mail today. I thought I would get another failure letter back, but I actually got the document. Check it out.

And there we have it. An official document linking Neva Levere (neé Condron) to Thomas Levere born 2 Feb 1922. It even has his father's name on there: Thomas Levere Sr. Those are the two people on the marriage certificate I uploaded a while ago. It all matches up.

I can't believe it. I finally solved the mystery about the "Levere" last name. That seriously has been like a 30-year mystery. Now all that's left is to wait for Neva -Hammond-'s death certificate. Hopefully it says Hammond at least, and extra hopefully it'll have a spouse's name. I applied for the certificate in-person on August 16th, so it should be here before the first week of September is up.

If it ends up listing the spouse's name as "Thomas Hammond", I'm gonna throw a damned fit.

G-Pa Tom Update #5: Tim(e) marches on

So, nothing really happening lately. Here's all that happened in the past few days.

I went to Van Nuys again to try and obtain Neva's death certificate. On the form I put "Neva Condron -OR- Neva Hammond" so here's hoping they actually do search for both names. I waited in line an hour because quit literally about 60-70 people were ahead of me. Most were couples because--as the man behind me pointed out--this was the line for "Birth, Death and Marriage Certificates". Those are the same thing I guess, right? When I got to the front of the line it cost $12 to get the form, so fingers crossed.

And next week I expect to get the letter back from Cleveland about my grandfather's death certificate. Because now I know (think) he really was born Thomas Earl LeVere. Not Condron or Hammond. All the other dates are right, but I also messed up on the parent's names because I think I still put Luella Moxley as his mother, but now I know it was Neva Condron.

That's really it for now. I found a crap-ton of information on that FamilySearch.org website. I found Thomas LeVere Sr.'s family on the 1910 Census. Printed out a lot of things about them; just names and dates, not personalities or pictures unfortunately. It's pretty interesting stuff.

It's gonna be a real bitch updating the family tree with all this info though...

G-Pa Tom Update #4: Too excited for a title.

I don't even know where to begin. I guess I can start out by saying I found a website called FamilySearch.org. Basically it's like Ancestry.com, except you can actually get the information off of the forms--you just can't see the original documents, but that's okay.

I don't even remember how I started out. I put in John Carlton Condron's name (my grandfather's father as per the SSI-5 form) just to see what came up. There was actually an entry on the site for the 1920's Census. I clicked on that, and...

I found this.

The first awesome thing is that his wife's name is listed as "Luella Condron." That means that on the SSI-5 form the name isn't "Lomella" like I thought, it looked like an 'm' because of that stupid blank line. So my grandpa's mother's name is "Luella Moxely."

But then if you go back and look at the names on the death certificate the mother's name says, "Neva Unknown." So if the 1920's census says my grandpa's mother's name is "Luella Condron", who the hell is Neva?

Direct your attention to the very last name on the '20's census form: Neva Condron.

Holy shit! My first thought was John Carlton Condron and Luella Moxley were his biological parents, but Neva was more of a mother figure. So he simply told everyone that his mother's name was Neva. Never mentioning a last name, just saying "Neva," because that was no one knew that she was actually his sister.

I brought this to my Writers' Group that night and showed the genealogy "expert" (she's just been doing it a long time, and she's writing a historical fiction novel) and together we came up with 2 possibilities:

1) Neva is the biological mother, but she birthed Thomas someplace else because of the shame of having a 17-year-old female in the early 1900's get pregnant and give birth.

2) My original theory above: Neva was his sister but was more of a mother figure to Thomas.

Unfortunately I couldn't find anything about this family in the 1930's census. I'll do some more research on that later. Unfortunately further,

I did a little more search on Neva Condron's name, only this time I widened the search years. And lo and behold, I found a most interesting marriage record.

BINGO! So Neva (who was apparently 2 months pregnant at the time) married some guy named Thomas Earl LeVere (I found out his name after some more searching), gave birth to my grandfather (Thomas Earl Levere II) somewhere in Ohio.

But what, there's more.

After some more searching, I found a death record for a girl born in Ohio on Sept. 2, 1904 (Neva's birthday) whose name is "Neva Hammond."

!!!!

So right now here's what I'm thinking. My grandfather was born a Levere. Later on Neva and her husband split up cuasing Neva to go back to her maiden name Condron. Her son (my grandfather) followed suit and changed his name to Condron, and that's why he put "Condron" down on the SSI-5 form. Later on, Neva found some guy with the last name of "Hammond", married him, and my grandpa Tom again followed suit and changed his name to Hammond.

There are a few things I still have to do before this mystery is completely solved:

1) I need to find some sort of document linking Thomas Earl Hammond to Neva Condron. Everything I've found so far is circumstantial. All the dates match and all that, but it still isn't enough.

2) I need to verify Neva's death certificate. Even though the dates and the place of birth matches, it says Neva died in 1980 in Glendale, California. That's quite a ways away from Ohio or Illinois. Where the name Hammond came from is still sort of unexplained. It'd also be nice to get the divorce record of Thomas Earl LeVere and Neva Condron.

More to come.

G-Pa Tom Update #3: Part 2

I would just like to add how depressed this has made me. Honestly, it makes me feel like I'll never find out about this guy.

If this next letter from Cleveland gets nothing, I'm hitting up Los Angeles County because that's where he was when he filled out the SSI-5 form. There's gotta be something somewhere...

G-Pa Tom Update #3: More fail. FML.

I contacted Cleveland, OH late July to try and get the man's birth certificate. That would hopefully give me another--more truer--look at his parent's names and I could go from there.

I'm not even gonna bother to scan the letter I got. It said this:
-----------------------
In regards to your request, we did not find a bc [birth certificate] on this person. Another issue is that we do not release a bc without mother's name.

Thank you,

Rosa V.
-----------------------
Included with that two-sentence letter I got the form I filled out back, plus my money order.

Here's the thing though. I based the information I had off of the SSI-5 form that was sent to me. Before I got this letter, I received G-Pa Tom's death certificate, and that says he was born in 1922. That makes more sense because according to the death cert, he was 83 when he died, and he died in 2005. Subtract those and you get 83, not 82.

I'm gonna send out the same form with the mother's name (apparently it was "Neva") an with a new birth year: 1922. Cross your fingers for me.

G-Pa Tom Update #2: Did he even exist?

Got the man's death certificate in the mail. My eyes went right to the Parent's names. Look what I found:

Epic fail...

This immediately told me one thing. On the same form somewhere lists his "surviving spouse" as someone named June Hammond. Not even June knew his parent's names. I understand that older people in relationships really have no need to talk about their parents, but seriously? No record of it at all? Anywhere?

It was at this point where my mom said out loud, "You know, I bet he made up the whole 'Lavere' story." After that was seeded in my head, coupled with the "Condron" on his SSI-5 form, that idea grew into agreement...

G-Pa Tom Update #1: My grandpa Tom "Hammond".

So as mentioned in the introductory blog post, the story of my grandfather's father changing his name was basically all we knew about him (and all we knew about grandpa Tom).

I saw that ad on TV for ancestry.com saying crap about the two-week free trial, so I figured, What the hell, and signed myself up. Long story short, regarding Tom Hammond's ancestry, I didn't find a damned thing.

Also I should mention I signed up for the two-week trial about a year ago.

Last month, I found out a friend of mine was a full ancestry.com member, and she offered to help me out. Long story short, she found grandpa Tom's social security number. Not only that, but she told me about this form I could fill out (an "SSI-711" form) and request a copy of an "SSI-5" form, which is the form that was filed out when a person wants to file for social security income. According to the government website, that form has the person's social security number, birthday, the father's full name and the mother's maiden name; precisely what I needed!

I filled out the form, paid the money, and got a response back in about a week and a half. Here is what I got (edited for security reasons):

Thomas Earl Condron

Now, besides the last name not being "Hammond" like it should be, here are some other interesting things to note.

1) According to that my G-pa was born in 1921, and he filled out that form in 1938. It even says on the form that he was only 17 when he filed for SSI. That seems pretty lame until you learn that my G-pa was blind. Apparently he was born with full sight, but it got progressively worse. So worse I guess that he couldn't work.

2) The form has his father's name, as well as his mother's maiden name. No first name unfortunately. Again, precisely what I needed.

3) CONDRON?! What the $@*(. So it wasn't my great grandfather that changed his name, oh no. It was my grandfather himself. That means the story he told my mom when she asked him was a lie. What the hell is this guy hiding? What happened that made him want to change his name? Unfortunately he passed in 2005, so unless I find something else on my search later down the road, no one will ever know.

So there you have it. No Lavere at all apparently. My name should actually be Tim Condron. Sounds a little too close to "condom" for my taste, but whatever it still sounds cool.

The Hystery of the Mystery

Hopefully I remember to update this blog regularly with the progress I make with my family history. I just recently got into genealogy and am becoming more and more interested in it. Along with the interesting things (which aren't really that interesting to talk about) comes the mysteries that get uncovered as I dig deeper. One mystery is about my father's father's father, and the other mystery is about my mother's mother's mother.

Great Grandfather:
As the story goes, my great-grandfather, in an effort to escape his past, changed his name to Hammond. It was said he didn't do this legally, he just started calling himself Hammond. His born name was "Lavere." Everything else about him was unknown: birthday, first name, potential wives, everything. At this point, the thing I find most strange is that my mother asked my grandfather about this, so it was her first time hearing any of this. Also however, it was my father's first time hearing this as well. That means my grandfather hadn't mentioned this to anyone before. What was he hiding?

Great-Grandmother:
This is the story about Bessie Hibbs. I 'm lucky enough to have a mother who is also interested in genealogy (as mentioned in the story above), so my mom accumulated a lot of information already; but not nearly enough. See my grandmother's brother and her birth mother both died in a car accident when my grandmother was about 10-years-old. On top of that, my grandmother's husband died when my aunt was also 10-years-old, so we think it sort of haunted my grandmother, resulting in her never talking about it. We don't know anything about Bessie or her son (my grandma's brother): where they were born, when the accident occured, anything.

This is the story of my quest to solve these mysteries.