Why do I Find This Exciting?

My great-grandmother continues to elude me in 1925. As do her children. I'm finding it very vexing because I can't figure out why I can't find her. My best guess is that the census transcription for the page that they're on in the 1925 Iowa census is typically mangled almost beyond recognition. What does it say about me that I refuse to give up? I mean, I *know* they're there. There is nowhere else that they would be.

So my current approach is to go through the census pages, starting with the counties and townships I know that they lived in either before or after, on the page that lists the person's father's name and where he was born, and looking for my great-grandfather. I find that I am actually quite enjoying this and it's enabled me to trace some of my great-grandmother's siblings.

So, yes, my family tree includes all kinds of documentation for offshoots and people who are not related to me whatsoever except by marriage. But sometimes I find out interesting information that way. And I like it. Maybe it's just that it appeals to the innate researcher in me. I don't know. But I love discovering little tidbits and finding one more piece of evidence that this person was *real*. And the fact that my great-grandmother's family is on the same census page as my great-grandfather's family, as are my great-grandparents themselves (who were newly married), in 1905? That, my friends? Is priceless.

The Things You Don't Know Can Trip You Up

I have spent the past week scrolling through census pages, trying - unsuccessfully - to find my great-grandmother. Because once my great-grandfather died, in 1923, I couldn't find anything until she died. It was driving me nuts. I *knew* she had to be there. I mean, where would she have gone?

Today, I found the answer. It turns out that she got married again. Mind you, she went back to Palmer, evidently, after her second husband died because that is the name on the Social Security Death Index and the name on her tombstone. So you can forgive me for being confused and thinking that I had not found the right Lena.

To further complicate matters, her daughter, my Auntie Helen, married her second husband's oldest son. So I was confused when I saw my great-aunt, under her married name, but listed as stepdaughter to the head of the house. Again, I thought it was just a coincidence. But when you combine the "coincidence" of the wife of the head being Lena P and there also being stepchildren with the names of my great-aunt and two great-uncles (my grandfather had gotten married two years earlier), the lightbulb finally went on over my head and I realized that I had, in fact, found those missing Palmers. And that the reason I couldn't find them previously was because they were on the 1930 census as Williamsons.

I have likewise been unable to find them in the 1925 Iowa census. So now I will go back and look for them under Williamson and see if, perhaps, they are there after all.