Finding Aunt Hat

When I was very young, in the days when the house was dark and adults were loud, there was visiting and discussions and a new word in our kitchen with its sloping roof. That new word was auction.
The word followed a lot of visitors, Aunt Effie and Aunt Edna -- Aunt Edna reminded me of a full-breasted bird, like a robin, only not red and brown.

Anyway, after these visits and these discussions and these words --"auction", whatever that was -- after all that, we got new (to us) furniture in our house.

I don't remember all of what we got, but one piece stands out in my memory. A dresser, a long, heavy dresser with carved legs and shiny dangly drawer pulls, and best of all, this humongous swinging mirror, hanging between carved curvy shiny pieces of wood.

I loved that mirror.
For all of its life and most of mine, I loved that mirror. It had to be taken off whenever the dresser was moved, and sometimes it couldn't be put back on the dresser. Our ceilings were too low, except in certain rooms and in certain spots.

The dresser was Aunt Hat's dresser.

I sorta knew who Aunt Hat was.Aunt Hattie. Sometimes, when we would walk uptown with Mamma, we would stop in and visit her. I don't remember much about her, but her home and her furniture were so well taken care of that it always almost felt like going into a church. It smelled so good, and things gleamed and there was light.

But, starting genealogy, it's been kind of tough figuring out who Aunt Hat was. There were Henriettas and Harriets and several possible prospects. No one (not surprisingly) was listed as Hat or Hattie.

Someone mentioned her house as being the Woods house, these many generations later. So -- one of our lines did have a daughter married to a Woods. That line also had her having a sister who could have been Hattie. Following that lead, we even found her as Hattie.
But Hattie's married name, as we had it, was not Woods. It was Ulrey.

But, we found her, eventually, and she was a Woods.
She had been married to that other person, and was divorced and remarried someone with the same last name as her sister's husband. He looks to be much older, and we haven't really placed him yet, but

We have found Aunt Hat!She was our grandfather's mother's sister, and lived right up the street from us.

And we found her by looking for her mother, who was known, officially, as both Anna and Dora Hayes, and we continue in search of any history on her. Her mother's name was Redman, and that's as far back as we can get.

Death, Present and Future

Didn't mean to abandon this blog. I'm still interested in the heritages, curious about the individuals, wanting to know the stories. Life got in the way for quite a little while.

My husband, Rex Allen Collins, born 8/23/1955 passed from this life on October 16, 2013. He left behind three daughters and three grandsons and one granddaughter. He was born in West Virginia and died in Cincinnati Ohio.

So, I have a real time death certificate. A genealogical document I would gladly have done without.
But, as a time or timely piece of officialdom, it has some interest.

On the death certificate, it asks, naturally enough, about cause of death. In his case, it was COPD. There are other details about that, but that doesn't matter here. The curiosity, to me, is that it goes on to ask if tobacco use contributed to death. The answer, of course (all things considered) was yes.

It -- the certificate also has places to be marked "if female" concerning pregnancy. 5 different options to choose from there. But it doesn't ask anything about pregnancy as a contributing factor.
It asks about on-the-job injury, with a block (address, time, etc) of blanks to be filled in on that subject.
It  has a place for transportation injury. I thought that section had asked about seat belt use, but I don't see that now.

Interesting way of collecting data, don't you think? Imagine if death certificates had always offered all of that type of information. We'd know a lot more about how our ancestors died, and probably about how they lived.

But even those minimal death certificates are an improvement on the information usually available from a tombstone.

And tombstones are an improvement over wooden markers that decayed, or piles of rocks that had no information.

Still, I wonder about the evolution of the death certificate. How will digitizing change official documentation, as information storage becomes increasingly electronic? Will there be a long lust of checkboxes about the cause and course of illness, accident, or general process of dying? Will an ordered (someday historical) death certificate print off the complete document, or only the parts relevant to the individual death? What will future death certificates offer our descendants about our lives beyond dates and locations?

No one knows the future, of course.
But how many of us worry over the documentation of that unknown future?
Is it even worth worrying over?

But, you gotta admit,for document junkies, it's intriguing speculation,