Hoosier Daddy

Taking a little break from the writing world to touch base on one of the many other things that I consider to be a "hobby"....genealogical research.

Yes, I know, there are people out there who are giving their screens that look that several of my friends and family give me when I mention that one of my favorite ways to spend a day when I have nothing else pressing is to go to the Maine Room at the Portland Public Library to search for records that might indicate who my great-great-grandparents might be.  Before any of you suggest one of the online libraries, like Ancestry.com, I already have a subscription there.  I've traced other branches of my family back to "the old country", and have confirmed or disproved a lot of the rumors involving my family.  The one exception is the one who started this whole search back in 1980, when I started using this search as a means of dealing with my grief over the loss of my father to lymphoma.

My great-grandfather, who appears in a census in Maine in 1870 with the young bride he had just wed that spring, is James Parker Dow.  According to the family bible, he died in February 1876, so his widow and their three children appear in the 1880 census of Maine.  I've located that widow, Susan, both in later census reports until her death in 1925, and in earlier census reports with her family.  I've traced most of her family tree back to England, where most of them boarded ships to the "New World" in the 1600's.

James is something of an enigma, as the only known record that would have named his parents would have been his marriage license.  A fire in the town where he and Susan got married destroyed that record.  Census records from 1860 have three boys by that name, but two out of the three can be traced to other families.  The third's family is as much of an enigma as James, as they appear only in that one census, then disappear from the town where they were living.  Like the record of the license for James and Susan, the records that may have given further details appear to either have been destroyed by either a series of fires that burned thousands of acres across the state in 1947 or by fires that occurred in the towns I'm searching.  The records that weren't destroyed by fire seem to have, at some point, been considered "unimportant" and have disappeared into vaults to collect dust.

Unlike a lot of other states in early United States history, Maine seems to have been a little behind the times in beginning a systematic means of keeping records of births, deaths, etc., on a statewide basis, as they began to keep all of these records in 1892.  Going to the towns and pulling up records that should indicate some of this information prior to 1892 has proven that there weren't necessarily sensible thoughts when it came time to vote in clerks to keep such records even on a town level, as I've sat staring at what was supposed to be a record of the happenings at a town meeting, trying to decipher what was written by an adult, but looks like the scribbles of a first grader who is in a rush to get to recess.  In other towns, I've read through pages of notes about how much Farmer Brown got for his prized bull and how many offspring said bull produced on which cows, but there is no indication of how many children Farmer Brown had or who he married said children off to....

In my own little way, I'm playing at being a detective.  It's probably a good thing that I didn't have to solve a crime this way, as the bad guy would have probably been long gone after 33 years of searching with as little result as I've had.  In the meantime, I can probably trace Farmer Brown's prized bull to his pedigreed great-grandbull who came over from Spain.....