So when I first met my father-in-law, he told me he had a brother and sister and then also a half brother and half sister he had never met because they were “stolen” from his mother after church one day by their father and she could never find them. I found that to be the weirdest story and when I first started to do family history research, I was like hmmmm, wonder if I can find out any info on them now that I have all these Ancesty databases. There must be some info. Well, first of all, common names like Campbell, their name, are SUPER HARD. And finding info on women is SUPER HARD because when they got married, they kinda disappeared. Without that marriage certificate link to their new name, they can be hard to find. Also, these people were both born in the 1920s. So I was like well, I will just stick them in there and see. I did find an Old Man Draft Card for WW2 that I thought was their father but mostly I just kept them on the sidelines while I looked at some of the other mysteries.
My father-in-law’s father also was a mystery as he had disappeared or run off, nobody seemed to talk much or know much about him other than he was a mean drunk so ya — ok, well, still, what happened to him? And my mother-in-law’s father also a run off but I did find his Social Security death index and confirmed he died in the 1990s.
When my father in law died in 2001, I let all those mysteries die for a while with him and then I took up Ancestry again and there was WAY more info as more and more records are digitized. So I thought, maybe give it another shot. I also talked to my father in law’s cousin who was in his 90s who had a lot more little tidbits and who said it would just be nice to know, whatever the outcome. I think he didn’t want to die without knowing as they had been his childhood friends and cousins and then one day they were just gone.
I was contacted on Ancestry by a lot of people asking about a lot of people I had on my family tree and some are friendly and some not so much but one super friendly lady contacted me about my husband’s grandmother, Bernice Sund, and asked me a lot of specific questions. Interesting. Then she asked about the Gerald and Barbara I had there on the tree as her first children. Well, turns out once upon a time she was married to Gerald and he had passed away and they had a son and she had the other half of my puzzle. It was very satisfying to know. I never knew these people, neither had my husband. Only my father in law’s cousin, Homer Andrew, knew them personally. He was overjoyed to get the closure on them and he died a few years later in a way that I think we should all die when we are old, he just sat down to eat breakfast and closed his eyes.
I wish everyone with a mystery missing person could have the same closure as it just picks at you even if it is someone you don’t know. If it is someone you love, it must be an overwhelming burden to carry with you and it must eat at you daily as your mind cooks up scenarios as to what could have happened.