My week of gold mining family history

Sunday evening I was doing a little research of family history.  From Mom's records I could see that she knew who Nana's parents were but that was as far back as she had posted on familysearch.  Then I found this:

In case you can't tell what this is, it's a marriage register from the town of Reading, Middlesex, Massachusetts.  The year is 1897 and #30 is Norman Muse and Agnes Doucette.  Take a look at what's there.  Occupations (stone worker and shoe-lining maker), place of birth, parents (including mother's maiden name), and who married them.  Pretty cool, huh?  

I found it at like, 11:15pm, gasped when I realized what it contains, and stared in awe as Matt came over to see what surprised me.  Then I did the next logical thing.  I called Mom even though it was 1:15am in Florida.  :)  Don't worry, she was actually still up and had emailed me a few minutes prior... also about family history.  

Then she said, "I have these papers here and I wanted to send you the info but I'm falling asleep as I type, so Dad can just scan them at work tomorrow and email it to you." 

Well guess what she had?  A paper from one of Nana's sisters outlining Nana's family history!  AND, get this.  She had Nana's great-grandfather's obituary from the Boston Daily Globe from 1904.  It has all of his children listed although it was dissapointingly silent on who is spouse or parents were...

I cut off the bottom of this written history because it lists all of Nana's (Beatrice's) siblings and some were still living when this was written down.  I think they've probably all passed because I think this paper itself is pretty old now.  Joe, Mike, Alicia, Kimmy, Mom, and Dad--you can see the whole paper in our family tree on family search if you want to.

Mom, how long have you had these?!  And you never told me?  :)  I'm teasing you.  But really, how long have you had these?  Well, this was a great jumping off point for finding about 15-20 more birth, marriage, or death records for Agnes's (Nana's mom) family including siblings, aunts, and uncles.  Among the treasures I found is John M Doucette's death certificate (same guy as in the obituary above).  

Do you see what's on there?  Yep, his parents, that's right.  There's still the generation between Agnes and John M, her grandfather--the Dominick and Julia generation.  And that's a little confusing and I haven't got it all worked out yet.  But, Dominick and Julia had 10 children according to that obituary and I've found 7 of them, including a 6-month old baby that died and a 10-year-old son that died (I've got both of their death records).  And it turns out Dominick married the year after he was widowed to another Julia, Julia Muse Doucette.  And I've figured out she was married first to Jeremiah Doucette (still not sure who he is) and she was widowed about the same time Dominick was.  She still had young children at home whereas Dominick's children were starting to get married. Are you getting the feeling that all of the Doucettes and Meuse families were all mixed together?  Me too.  And it doesn't help that their names are the French-Canadian equivalents of John Smiths and Ben Johnsons...

Okay, now lets jump back to Nana's parents (remember this is Nana's mom's family we've been looking at); what about her father's parents?  Well, I found their marriage record last night too.  Norman Meuse was the son of Alexander Muse and Mary Doucette if you look at that very first marriage record in this post.  Well, here is the record of Alexander and Mary's marriage although there was no image available for it.

I feel like I can't research and link sources to people fast enough.  There is so much just sitting there waiting to be looked at.  But isn't that pretty cool?

PS- don't let the variations in name spelling throw you off.  On the census they used to ask if you could read or write and what your native language was.  Although almost all of our family could speak English many of them, particularly the men for some reason, didn't read or write.  And so when they had events like their marriage or birth of children they told the recorder what their name was but didn't know how to spell it.  It helps if you know how to pronounce French words and you can get a better idea of how the various spellings evolved based on whether the recorder knew French or only spoke/wrote in English.  I'm really glad Matt and I took those two introductory French courses last year through UVU's community education program.