Genealogy Jottings

My great-grandfather Samuel H. Reed eludes me because he had a fairly common name, married more than once, and moved around a lot. I still do not have a complete census survey for him. I came one step closer recently when I finally found his record on the 1870 U.S. census. I knew that the prior year he had married Nancy Dudley in Illinois, and the first child, Anna, was born in Kansas in August 1870. Yet for years I could not locate Samuel and his bride in 1870 in Illinois, Kansas, or anywhere else. Finally, using some creative search techniques on Ancestry, I found them in Neosho County, Kansas. The script for their surname was a little hard to make out, and it had been indexed as “Beed”, not “Reed”. With modern technology, I could search for Samuel with just a first name and a birth year, bypassing the mis-indexed surname. Gotcha, Sam!

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