My son and I went to Richmond, Indiana, yesterday to search for information on my family history. My mother's family spent a few generations in the Richmond area. My mother moved away from the area with my father. We visited the Morrison Reaves Public Library there.
The Morrison Reaves Library has a nice section on research materials for family history. We spent time going through Newspaper Index books for the years 1872-1888.
In going through the books I found some information. My great grandmother, Lulu Pickett Hoover, filed a lawsuit against a man for breach of contract. Apparently he was promised to marry her and he went off and married another woman. By the time the case went to court he also had a child with the woman. My great grandmother, Lulu Pickett, had sued for $3,000.00. When it came to trial she chose to take $150.00.
Lulu's brother, William H. Pickett, also sued a trespasser for $15.00 and he was granted the money;.
I didn't have time to go to the courthouse to check out these records and she if there was more information on the two cases.
Is is normal to be able to find information on cases like this?
I found where my great, great grandfather, Henderson Gibson, was informed that he had a letter waiting for him in General Delivery. There was no other information.
My great grandfather, Frank Hoover, was married three times. His first wife died from Typhoid shortly after they were married. His second wife died within a couple of years of marriage, but not before giving birth to a child, Emma Hoover. Emma died at 3 months of age. I was able to find out about Emma for the first time yesterday, by going through the death indexes at the library. I have been told that Frank had a son named, John. I have not been able to find any information on John. My older cousin remembers writing letters to him in California when she was younger. She lost contact with him at one point and was never able to find him again.
Frank next married Lulu, who apparently had gotten over being jilted by then. They had three children then Frank died when the children were very young.
We left the library after a few hours and decided to make a stop at Earlham Cemetery. My brother had taken pictures there in the past, but my son and I had never been there to find graves. I did stop one day when I was going through Richmond and was able to go through the files of burial records and photographed all that I found. Some of those had causes of death and other information.
This time we decided we didn't have time to look for all the graves so we chose to search for my great, great grandfather Lester (Pop) Mannis. The directions the caretakers office gave were not the easiest to follow. We went different directions and searched through the stones to find the graves we were looking for. My son called me when he found the makers and told me where to find him.
We found Lester buried next to his second wife, Augusta, and on the other side of her is her son from a previous marriage.
In previous photos that we had received we were not able to read the stone very well. This time, we cleaned the grave off a little and we were able to read the entire stone. It photographed pretty well, too. We were able to find the squadron information that he had served in during World War 1. This is new information and will give us something new to search for. He was private in the S72 Aero Squadron. If anyone has any information on how to get any records from the military service, I would love to know how to do more research.
We had spent the better part of a day driving to the area, visiting the library, and then stopping by the cemetery. It was time to head home, and see what information we could dig up with what we found.
I hope to make future trips to Richmond and have time to go through more records.
