An alternative blog title: Why I Love Primary Sources

 I love the free resources that are available for research today, like ancestry and Family Search. However, since they are mostly reliant on volunteers to transcribe the documentation, there are lots of errors and such, mostly in spelling. Sometimes the names are spelled wrong and transcribed correctly, sometimes they are spelled right and transcribed wrong in a way that makes sense, and sometimes you wonder what the person was thinking. One of my ancestors, Genest, a male, was recorded in a census as a "Janet" and had the wrong sex. Census on either side had a person of the correct age and in the correct birth order named Genest, but that one particular one he must not have been home, and the recorder just wrote down what made sense to them. Janet is much more common a name than Genest!

So sometimes my searches are frustrated by spelling issues. Henry Attwell Post, my great grandfather, has his second (disambiguating, there are so many Henry Posts!) name spelled with 2 Ts, as I discovered on opening some books that are inscribed to/by him. In searching, I found records with both 1 and 2 Ts, so I was glad to have the final word from the horses' mouth! 

Attwell is Henry's mother's Maiden name, her name was Mary Josephine Attwell. Unsurprisingly, I found records that list her as Mary Josephine and as Josephine Mary. Hopefully something definitive will come to light. Henry is unique for his era in that he was an only child. The above and below texts are dedicated to him from his Aunt Catherine/Cassie, who was listed as the head of household in the 1900 census for New York. This is dated 1902, Christmas. Cassie was a schoolteacher and not married. The books she dedicated to him are part of the Little Women series, which I read many years ago. I hope he enjoyed them as much as she hoped he would! I love getting books for Christmas.

One of the other two books he inscribed himself, I must not have taken a photo of that one which defeats the purpose of this post slightly. However I can still state how much I love primary source info, and give big thanks to one Mr Guthrie at Shorewood high school for beginning that knowledge journey for me.