Death record leads to more questions than answers

Question

I'm near the end of a tedious task of adding 13 children in a family.  Almost all had oodles of records easily available, but the last one is turning out to be a difficult research job, with very few records to be found.

Two census records and a marriage record show her name as Inez, but her death record shows her as Myrtice Inez and only gives the year of her death date - 1949, when she was about 26 years old.  Her husband's death record also shows only the year - also 1949 - and the certificates are numbered sequentially, which suggests that they died together.

I'm wondering what happened - were they victims of a disaster or maybe a car accident or ???  Also, did their infant child (name, gender, and birth/death dates unknown) die with them?

Answer 1

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/57022353/the-selma-times-journal/

The above clipped article has details of their death.

One thing I noticed in your profile was that you wrote that they were married in Alabama City, Etowah County, Alabama. I know that is what FamilySearch.org's index says, but they have the same city/county for EVERY marriage record in that collection. I think that location is an indexing error, but I can't prove it unless/until I look at the actual images. What I'm doing for marriage records in my own part of the tree which are indexed "Alabama City, Etowah County, Alabama" is just recording that they were married in Alabama until I can view the images or find another source.

Comments

To add to Nelda's comment on the marriage:  Ancestry has the marriage as 3 Jan 1942 (Geneva, Alabama).  The image shows Wilson Inez 31 (county code) 1 3 42 (date) 3 (volume) 1005 (certificate number)

Source Information

Ancestry.com. Alabama, Marriage Index, 1800-1969 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006.

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Nelda, you are absolutely amazing!!!  THANX ever so much.

The William Wilson who also died in that accident, along with his son, is incorrectly named in the newspaper article.  I already had the death date for Inez' brother Ivey Wilson and for his son, although I didn't know anything about the circumstances of their deaths.

About that marriage record - J Palotay found and added the certificate to Inez' profile and it even gives her exact birth date, which I didn't have even a hint about before, plus identifies the marriage as having taken place in Geneva County, where her family had lived at the time.  The funny thing, though, is that most of her siblings' marriage records that I found are in the same collection at family search and some show up there as Geneva County, while a couple of them are shown as Etowah County.

THANX for the info about the ancestry record, Lauren - nice find!

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Excellent!  You're very welcome Gaile.  :-)

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Happy to help! My Newspaper.com subscription has been worth every penny!

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Note that the record from FamilySearch is the _license_. The index on Ancestry is likely from the actual certificates, so I would accept its date and location (if it can be decoded) as more authorative for the actual event.

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J, I found it very interesting that the family search marriage record was 1 day earlier than the date on the image you found.  I looked, expecting to verify that the family search record was the license and the image you found was the actual marriage certificate, but I discovered that your image document is titled "license".

I suspect that Nelda's and Lauren's comments about the family search index having the wrong location are only the tip of the iceberg and they probably made a transcription error in the date.

THANX again for that image!

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Sometimes the license and marriage are on the same document, sometimes not - it depends on the state.  It helps to see the images themselves.  Same with United States naturalization - there are several steps and documents maybe over a period of months, but family search tends to index that all are the actual naturalization event.  In the above marriage, the license is dated 2 January and the marriage is 3 January.  Looks like Alabama is as bad as New Jersey with number codes for counties on a printed list with no viewable certificate.

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Here's more to confuse things.  I was looking for the county codes in 1942 and found this regarding license plates.  According to this list, Etowah was 31 and Geneva 34.  The marriage record I spoke of has 31 listed so perhaps the license was in Geneva (per the image) and the actual marriage in Etowah.  https://www.shoplicenseplates.com/Alabama-License-Plates-County-Codes

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Yes, the county number codes do create confusion for genealogists. I'm not sure when, but I suspect the number codes for today are not the same as they were when that marriage index was created. Geneva is not the same number code now that Ancestry is saying it was then. If I remember when I looked it up, Geneva is 34 now, but Ancestry is saying that 31 (where that marriage license was issued) was Geneva. (or vice versa--I'm trying to remember from when I looked at it originally.)

I was born and lived most of my life in Alabama. The codes were based on population--the county with the largest population, Jefferson, was/is number 1. I lived in Mobile County growing up, it was/is number 2. Later I lived in Baldwin County which was/is number 5. So, perhaps at some point, because of population shifts, someone had the bright idea of reassigning the county codes. Just a possibility...

I've been encountering this situation with FamilySearch with so many marriages in my extended family supposedly taking place in Etowah County. So I tried to research to find out why. There is a famous waterfall there, but I couldn't find anything about it being a "wedding destination" back in the day. That is when I concluded that it was probably an indexing problem. Oh, it would be so much better to see the actual image of the certificate instead of relying on the index of an index. But I suppose we have to take what we can get sometimes.

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THANX for the education on the county numbering system.  I live in Alabama now - 13 years ago I got married, we both retired, and moved here all at once.  

The family I'm working on is that of a wonderful lady who helps me care for my husband.  I've come to think of her as the daughter I never had.  She was adopted with her 5 siblings and later they all spent a long time in foster care - lots of bad experiences - and she told me that she knows the names of her birth parents, but nothing about them, so I was off and running.  After pulling my hair out with my family in Eastern Europe where I can hardly find anything, her family is soooooo easy - they're all from Alabama, and in 1 week I got back to ggg-grandparents, with lots more to do even farther back than that.

I think you're talking about Nokalula (spelling?) Falls in Gadsden or nearby.  The property my husband and I bought is in Grant (between Guntersville and Huntsville) and we have a waterfall as good or better.  Check my "personal journal" website to see pics.  People call to visit our falls all the time and lots of people have taken prom pics here, although no wedding pics.

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North Alabama is gorgeous territory. We considered moving there when I retired, but decided on north Georgia instead.

I looked at the source Lauren linked, so it seems like the county numbers changing probably did not happen. I still tend to think this goes back to an indexing error someone made at some point. I just kept seeing so many records in which people had traveled to Etowah County to get married that I suspected something was off. I could be totally wrong--maybe that was the thing to do (like going to Las Vegas to get married was.) It is odd that Ancestry.com says the marriages took place in a different county than FamilySearch.org does. As Lauren said, the license could have been obtained in one county and the marriage could have taken place in another. It's a mystery, for sure.

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I see a lot of marriage records for not only Etowah County, but specifically Alabama City in it.  The only thing I find strange is that I have also seen records in the same family search index collection that show Geneva County.  Take a look at the profile this question is about - she's the youngest of 13 children and I've already completed profiles for all 12 siblings (the family lived in Geneva County the whole time) - click those and see that some of their marriages were also shown as Etowah but at least a few are shown as Geneva … strange, huh?

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Gaile, I looked on Newspapers.com to see if I could find any newspaper stories about their marriage but didn't have any success. I didn't notice before that you actually have a copy of the marriage license. Was that there before and I just overlooked it? Anyway, it was obviously issued in Geneva County. It would be nice, now, to find out who certified the marriage.

I don't know, truly. It just seems so strange to me that so many people were going to Alabama City to get married. I still have about nine couples in my personal database for whom I didn't shorten the location from Alabama City, Etowah County to just the state of Alabama. I think I'll go back through those to see if I can find out anything else about those marriages. If I find out anything which could be relevant to this discussion, I'll let you know.

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Oh, goodness, this just gets worse...

My great-aunt was Lessie Ree (Raynor) Bodden Morgan. Her record is the first one I've looked at to compare what FamilySearch had in its index, with what Ancestry has in its index, with what is on the image of the index at Ancestry...

Nothing matches!

FamilySearch index says that her marriage to Clyde Morgan took place on 13 July 1957 in Alabama City, Etowah County, Alabama.

Ancestry index says that her marriage to Clyde Morgan took place on July 1957 (no day given) in Mobile County, Alabama.

The actual image of the index has 22 July 1957 in Marion County, Alabama. (the county code is 49.) (His entry on another page in the index corresponds information-wise to hers, so I have the correct couple.

I looked in the Mobile County Marriage Records database online. It complicates the matter even more. Their database has that the marriage license was issued in that county on 5 Jul 1957.

Four different sources--Three different dates (four if you include the one which didn't give a day)--three different places....

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Nelda, the FS index location is one of those "where the heck did they get that??" ones. The license actually says Mobile. (I've attached the image to your great-aunt's profile.)

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J, thank you so much for finding and posting this to her profile! How are you able to access these images?

I see a 49 written in next to the word Mobile. I wonder what that 49 signified?

Okay, this is going to sound far-out...I wonder if the county codes used for records such as this one is different than the county codes used for license plates? Maybe we've been assuming they were the same when they were not. That would explain the why the indexer at Ancestry knew 49 was for Mobile County (Mobile's license plate number is 2.)

There's still no explanation as to why FamilySearch connected anything about this record to Etowah County, but it does confirm that I was right to be suspicious of the entries there which say "Alabama City, Etowah County, Alabama" as the event place.

Again, thank you so very much!

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Nelda, the image of the marriage license wasn't there when I asked the question.  J added it very shortly after your first answer.

My solution - for now at least - is when I find marriage records at family search that show Etowah when I know the family lived in Geneva for several generations, is the following statement:

Victor married  Edna Warr February 14, 1942, possibly in Alabama City, Etowah, Alabama, United States,<ref name="marriage" />
but more likely in Geneva County, Alabama, United States.

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Gaile, that "disclaimer" is a good idea. I think Geneva County is the most likely place for your couple's marriage to have taken place. I'm just sorry we don't know for sure, yet. But, I know between all of us involved in this conversation, we've done our very best to find out.

I figured out the numbering system in that index of marriage records at Ancestry.com. It's alphabetical. In the index, Mobile County is county code 49 because when you list the counties alphabetically, Mobile is in the 49th position. Geneva County is in the 31st position alphabetically so its county code in that index is 31. So, the numbers on the images in the Alabama, Marriage Index, 1800-1969 do NOT correspond to the license plate numbers. I think it would have been helpful for Ancestry.com to have had this little tidbit of information available in the first place.

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Nelda, everywhere I looked for information on county codes says that the code system started in 1941 for license plates.  The first 3 were based on population and the rest followed alphabetically.  Even though populations changed, the code system did not.  You made an interesting discovery and it makes sense, so perhaps the code system for marriages was strictly alphabetical all along.  The Ancestry index for Inez Wilson stated Geneva and the county code on the image sheet was 31 which fits your alphabetical discovery.  I'm sorry I confused things with the license plate information, but there is literally nothing on the internet about county codes specifically for marriages in Alabama and I assumed that the code system was for all records in the state.

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Nelda (and Gaile): for the images, I use Windows freeware written by a Hungarian genealogist in Germany. Message me if you want to try it and I'll find the download link. (The interface is all in Hungarian, but I can help you with that.) It doesn't work for everything, but anything's better than the nothing we'd otherwise currently have.

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Lauren, I assumed exactly the same thing--that the "county codes" in that index were the same as the license plate codes. I was going to post what you did only you did it first. It was only yesterday when I realized the county code for my great-aunt was way off and began to check some of the other names on that same index page that the alphabetical=numerical pattern emerged. Not only was the code for the marriage not on the internet--it wasn't on Ancestry's description of the index and it hasn't been anywhere in the index itself that I've looked. When the description said "county codes" my mind went automatically to the license plate numbering system, just as yours had.

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Nelda - well, as they say, great minds think alike and then the record makers/keepers throw a monkey wrench into an already hair-pulling hobby!  Best wishes to you on your bumpy journey of discovery.  ;-)