This is a follow-up post to my original post: Meeting My Great-Grandmother.

The brick wall my great-grandmother, Emma (Fisher) Hughes, presented was a challenge. She seemed to appear out of nowhere when she married my great-grandfather, John Hughes. My focus in this research was to identify when and where Emma was born and who her parents were.

As with any genealogy problem, I started with what I knew.

She died in Enid, Oklahoma in 1948. The first step I took was to send a request to the Oklahoma Department of Health to get a copy of her death certificate. You can view the entire certificate here. Here is a close-up of the area in question:

The certificate provided a birth date: 16 April 1874. It listed her birth place as Kansas. It provided no informaton on her parents’ names.

When looking at any record you need to establish its credibility before you can evaluate the information it shows.

Is the source an original or a derivative?

The certificate is a certified true photocopy of an original. That means I can treat it as an original.

Is the information in the record from a primary or secondary source?

Actually, the record contains both primary and secondary information. The primary information about date and cause of death came from the doctor. The primary information on the burial came from the funeral director.

The personal information on birth date, birth place, and parents appeared to be a neighbor. That is secondary information because that person was likely not present at her birth, nor knew her parents.

Is the evidence that this record provides direct or indirect evidence to answer the research question?

This record does identify Emma’s birth date and birth place. That means it provides direct evidence to the research queston on when and where Emma was born.

Evaluation

Death certificates are documents that record a variety of information about the person to whom it belongs. Some of the information, unfortunately, may be far from the date it originally happened. Information on birth dates, places, and parents can be questionable when it comes to death certificates.

According to her death certificate, Emma was 72 years old when she died. The person providing the infomration was a neighbor or friend of the deceased. The information on Emma’s birth date and birth place is a starting place, but that information needs corroboration.

Next: Census Records Talk

My journey in finding how who my great-grandmother offered me my first taste of deep genealogical research. And I have had the deep genealogy bug ever since.

When I started getting deep into my family’s history, I found that one of my great-grandmothers seem to drop out of the sky on the day she married my great-grandfather. I had no clue who her father and mother were. I really didn’t know anything about her except a few things. Maybe my journey to find her will help you discover that ancestor of yours that suddenly appeared.

This is going to take a few posts, but let me give you an introduction to my great-grandmother as I knew her before I found out so much.

Her name was Emma (Fisher) Hughes. I knew she was born around 1873, likely in the state of Illinois. She married my grandfather, John Hughes, on 1 September, 1898 in Minneapolis, Ottawa County, Kansas. She had one daughter, Josie, from a previous marriage.

After marrying my great-grandfather, she settled down on his family farm in Sumner County, Kansas. Over the next few years, her and my great-grandfather had five children: Bertha, Maud, Harry, Noah, and Edith. Noah was my grandfather. The family was there in the 1910 federal census and both of the 1905 and 1915 Kansas state censuses.

Their marriage was apparently not a great success. Soon after John’s mother died in 1916, the family broke apart. John went to parts unknown. Emma ended up settling in Enid, Oklahoma where she worked as a domestic. I find her there in both the 1920 and 1930 censuses. She died there in 1948.

None of her documentation showed who her parents were and where exactly she was born.

The journey to finding her turned when I had a happy meeting online. More in a later post.