04 April 2013

The Key To Identifying My Great Grandfather


I wanted to share the 1900 Census record which led to identifying my grandfather's paternity. I had already identified my great grandmother, Pearl Etta Gordon, in the 1900 census, living with her grandmother in Lake County, IN. When I did a search on Ancestry.com for Pearl, I found a second 1900 census with her on it. This duplicate census, shown above, lists her as a servant in the Benjamin household. Right above her is Presley Evans Lawrence. Because of the timing of her pregnancy with my grandfather, Presley struck me as someone who could possibly be my grandpa's father. If Pearl and Presley were not listed together on this census, even with DNA testing, we may have never been able to positively identify Presley as my grandfather's father.

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