Earlier this year, I was working on a very complicated family history project where several members tragically died young. As a result, families were split up, and some children were adopted and connections were lost. In unraveling the story, I was able to track one family down and find that a few of them had passed away in Colorado, but had never lived there. This fact jumped off the page to me and I immediately wondered why? Then it hit me...Didn't people go to Colorado to recover from illness in the late 1800s and early 1900s? What kind of illness would this be? As I searched further, I discovered that another family member had died of tuberculosis and it all came together. One quote I read said that at one point nealy 1/3 of Colorado's population was there because of tuberculosis. Whoah! It turns out that our people were probably in Colorado trying to get better and never made it. This disease devastated many American families and had impacted this one greatly.
The lesson here is that there are often bits of information that are screaming at you from behind the scenes. They may not be written on the documents in front of you, but always pay attention to what is not being said. Sometimes it can reveal the answer you are looking for.
RSS Feed
