I love the topic for week 43, “Dig a Little Deeper”.  Ads for online family history sites often make it look easy to find answers about our ancestors. Often, it takes a little more investigation.

My Barber line is well-documented as my ancestors came over in 1637. My Tompkins line, not so easy. I’ve written about them before. My grandmother was placed in foster care when she was around 12 years old. It frustrated me over the years because I live in the city where she was born, and I could find nothing. Her birth certificate could not be located as she said the records had been destroyed.

She told me so little about her family. I knew her parent’s names, sibling names, and that her father was born in Canada. Her father has a relatively common name. Census records provided some clues about the family, but it was not enough.

I kept going though. I worked through this branch of my family extensively with my ProGen study group starting in the fall of 2021. The feedback from the group helped me to dig deeper, and to look for other possible records. I ordered my great-grandparents death certificates in early 2022. (I’m still waiting for them now in November 2023.) By the end of 2022, I had discovered from the NYS Death Index that my great-grandmother had died at Craig Colony, an institution for poor epileptics in Livingston County, NY.

I started looking for other ways to validate the evidence I had for my great-grandparent’s. Finally, I found some digitized cemetery records through a local genealogy group. These documents proved my great-grandmother died at the Colony.

I attended an in-person conference for the local group a few weeks later. I overheard a couple of people discussing the Colony. I started to talk with them and found out there was a talk to be held the following weekend about Craig Colony. I attended that talk. The speakers had recently written a book, with details about the place and many photographs.

It took a long time to get answers about this line of my family. My advice is to keep digging. And if you need help, hire a genealogist! We love to work on these cases!