In all honesty I just hadn't felt like it lol.
But now I do, so:
1) With the help of a Mormon Genealogy Super-genius, let's call him "Harry," we have narrowed down the possible death years of Bessie Hibbs.
When I sent the letters off to New Jersey trying to get her death certificate, I didn't have an exact date of death, and NJ charges $1 per year you want searched, so I only had them search for five years: 1927 to 1932. As the family story went, my grandmother was 10-years-old when her mother--Bessie--died, and my grandmother was born in 1921, so that would put the death date around 1931. Right? Well, not quite.
See we found Bessie's husband on the 1930 Census. On that census was the husband, my grandmother, my aunt, and my grandmother's step mother Beulah Ristow (neé DeFrehn). So by 1930, the husband was already remarried. That's proof that not only my grandmother was NOT 10-years-old when her mother died, but the rejection letters I got back from Trenton were right.
We took that knowledge and put it together with my grandmother actually having memories of her mother, and a human doesn't start forming memories until they're about four. That would put the year at 1924-25.
So Bessie's death date was somewhere between 1924 and 1927.
2) I'm becoming more and more acclimated to the Family History Center's computer programs they use, so it's getting easier and I'm getting faster at doing my genealogy. With this, I've learned I'm related to a lot of awesome people:
- John Locke (2nd cousin, 7 times removed)
- Emily Dickenson (5th cousin, once removed)
- Daniel Wesson [of "Smith and Wesson"] (5th cousin, twice removed)
- Jack London [he wrote "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang"] (6th cousin, once removed)
- Stephen Crane [wrote "Red Badge of Courage"] (6th cousin, once removed)
- Henry David Thoreau [American essayist] (5th cousin, 3 times removed)
- WALT %$%)*( DISNEY!! (7th cousin)
- Robert Goddard (6th cousin, once removed)
- Agatha Christie, John Steinbeck, Robert Graves, Jane Austen [no wonder I like to write]
- and most notably, John Wentworth. Read more about him here. Be sure to scroll down and read about The Wentworth Letter.
That's pretty much it. Everything else that's happened to me has been about school and career choices.
It's getting to the point to where if I ever discover what happened to Bessie, I won't know what to do anymore.
