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.
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