All My Ancestors

Using Ancestry.com, I found my paternal grandparents in the same place they lived until their deaths in the 1977 and 1982. Trolling through the unindexed Ancestry images reminded me of the days when we scrolled through reel after reel of microfilm–ok for the short term but I’m eager to have access to a search engine for more mobile folks.

This is one of the few records I’ve seen that shows all 8 children in the same household. It sort of makes my heart stop when I see children aged 25 through 4–I can’t imagine a house full of 10 people, including grown sons as well as a 4 year old.

Granddad is the last person on page 2B and then the rest of the family begins the next page:

This list of my aunts and uncles, along with my dad, reminds me once again that practically no one in this family used their birth names.

There’s Lowell C[ooper], Cooper was my grandmother’s maiden name, who was always known as Scoops.
Clark Mobley (Mobley was Granddad’s mother’s maiden name) was Pete.
Dorothy E[valyn] was Dot.
Gertrude R[uth] was Ruth. (Gertrude was Grandad’s mother’s first name)
Donald G[uice] was Jack–later legally changed to Jack. Guice was also a Mobley family name
Raymond K. was known as Ray–pretty close to his actual birth name
T. Morrison was my dad, named after his father, officially Thaddeus Morrison Osborne, Jr., known as Morrison
and the “baby” was G[eorge] Landrum, always known as Landrum. George was Grandmother Rachel’s father AND brother’s name, and Landrum was another family name.

I was most anxious to see the 1940 census to find my mom as she had not been born on the 1930 census. But seeing this entire family together in one household was rewarding as well.

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