Eleno Gonzalez...
One of the first names I placed in my tree “That First
Night”. It was a
named I pulled off of FamilyTree.org with an un-sourced birthdate of “abt 1900”. Believe me, that early in my new addiction, I
wasn’t worried about the un-sourced part.
But as I have built my tree out, and spent time on
Findagrave.com, I wanted to know more about this brother of my
grandfather. A couple of things came
together that renewed my interest in trying to fill out his details in
my tree; First, my father recently pointed him out in an old picture of an
Easter Egg hunt I remember being a part of in 1969. Hmmm, I actually met this man? Granted, I was only 7 at the time, but that
is still 1 degree of separation. And
second, as I stated in an earlier posts, I am cleaning up both my tree[1] on
Ancestry.com and taking the time to fix what I have seen on Familysearch.
I have searched for records pertaining to him several
times. He has been in my tree since day
one, and Ancestry would only have 3 hints; none of which pertained to him. Google turned up nothing. Asking older relatives that knew of him did
not yield much more. Lived in Corpus;
sold radio advertising. But still
nothing. Hmmph.
When I got to his part of my tree it just
bugged me again. Someone had added his
name and “about” birthdate on Familysearch.org some time ago and he was just kind of left like
that. He only ended up in my tree
because he was tied to my g-grandparents records.
I started to dig again.
This time I decided to try something different. I searched for him on Ancestry without
the search linking to his name in my tree. Just a
blind search; Eleno Gonzalez, DOB 1900 +- 10 years. No parents, no siblings. And this time I got a hit.
It was a WWII registration document for an Eleno Gonzalez
living in New Orleans in the early 1940’s.
It states he is from South Texas, and it had a birthdate that was in 1910.[2] Hmmm, more information to search from…
So using this birthday I performed another search. I hit on a death certificate from Corpus
Christi, Texas in 1980.[3] And low and behold, his parents are
listed. My g-Grandparents Ines Gonzales
and Elena Longoria.
I have searched death certificates on Family Search with
both those names listed as parents, and never came across his death
certificate.
Now that I knew I had the right guy, I started adding these
records to my tree. From that, new
“Shaky leaves” popped up. They
indicated a marriage and a divorce.
They also indicated there were children from that marriage. Cousins, I never knew of.
Subsequently, from searches performed from that one blind
search, I discovered he was married at least 2x’s, there are even
more cousins I never knew of.
Using the information I discovered, and some Internet
sleuthing, I tracked down a couple of cousins from those lines on
Facebook. I messaged one of them and he
responded back. I introduced myself as a
not too distant cousin and certainly unknown to each other until now. I hope from this communication, I may learn
more about this side of my family I seemed to know so little about.
And all of this because a brick wall was just bugging me so
much.
And I attempted a search with as little information as possible.
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