A long spring, summer, and fall chasing fish and cloven-hooved mammals ends, and a new chase begins for people who never knew they'd be pursued. I've spent the past week seeing what new data became available over the past eight months. There has been some painfully small, but happy, discoveries.
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| 1880 Federal Census Excerpt |
The wife gifted me a Kindle Fire recently. I avoided it, but eventually downloaded the Ancestry.com application. Among the first hints given was the 1880 Federal Census which documented my Great Great Gramma', Sarah J. Criss, living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with her children and perhaps a brother-in-law. Way t'go Amazon! The document spells her last name "Christ", and records her sharing a residence with M.M. and Mariah Williams and children. Her relationship to the head of the household (M.M. Williams) is "Servant." Don't know if the two families are related or not. I doubt it. Unfortunately, the census does not show Sarah's husband, John, living among them.
Following this lead took me to the 1900 Federal census. At this time, Sarah and her family are in Colorado, but in Alabama the M.M. Williams family lives adjacent to a family with the name of "Crist." Don't know if these folks are related to Sarah and her family, but I'd like to believe it. So research will focus on this family and determining their relationship to Gramma' Sarah.
More searching on her family lead me to new information from the Social Security and Claim Index. Sarah's daughter, Amelia, filed this paperwork in 1940. In her application, she records her father's name as John W. Criss, her mother's as Sarah J. Criss. While I appreciate learning her father's previously unknown middle initial, I would have been
most grateful had she written her mother's maiden, instead of her married, name. Close . . . . so painfully close.
