I love a good mystery

Other people have ordinary hobbies like gardening and raising chickens. My hobby is digging for dead people. To me, it is like reading a good mystery story, where you use all the available clues to solve the puzzle. Since the sisters have recently re-connected with a cousin online, I thought I would try to find her father and his family on the census. So far Uncle Harold has been a complete washout, so I tired Uncle Tom Gwaltney. Again I came up completely empty handed, finding no trace of either of these men in online genealogies. My third choice was George Leo Reed. Until a couple of weeks ago all I knew of Uncle George’s history was that he married my Aunt Winnie, he was in the Navy in WWII, was from West Virginia and lived in St. Louis. With a little searching and a lot of luck, I found his obituary online listing his sister and brothers. This led me to his 1930 census record, which led to 1920, 1910, 1880, 1870, 1860 and 1850 census records for his Reed ancestors. In addition, I have found an obituary for his greatgrandmother, a bio of his great uncle listing both his maternal and paternal grandparents, and finally this photo on find a grave of the tombstone of James Quinter Reed, Grandfather of Uncle George. I have placed what I found, including the census records, on our Three Sisters web site http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~powell/reed/ and added the Reed family to our database
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=fletaaday&id=I3726
on World Connect.

Maybe next week I will work on Uncle Harold again, but I fear he is like Grandma Betty Cooper who was born in a cave and the census taker did not list caves.