After seeing the confusion of the 1900 U.S. Census and the double entries for two of my great-great-aunts, I noticed that I had never bothered to find marriage records for Eva M. Pinkham and Walter Shackley or Martha A. Pinkham and Richard A. Roberts. Ironically, I had all four death certificates, the first two from California, the last two from Massachusetts. I'm sure I must have searched New Hampshire where I found all the marriage certificates for Carrie M. Pinkham (Applebee, Corson, and Corson, she married three times). It seems to me that at one point you could only search the certificates at Concord up to 1903.
In any case, I thought it was a great chance to use the Family History Pilot Search that many people are using and, quite rightly, extolling. So I searched New Hampshire Marriages 1720-1920. Not there. There are close to 650,000 records in this particular database, but it doesn't tell me if that represents 100% of the records or not. Boo. Hiss. For whatever reason, I redid the search for all the databases in Pilot Search for Eva Pinkham's name, because I felt it was unique enough not to retrieve thousands of hits. And it didn't. And I found her marriage certificate in Massachusetts. She married in Boston, and sure enough, so did her sister Martha. Although I got a date, place, parent names, etc. from Family History Pilot, it gives a source film number as a reference, which I find inadequate. So I looked up the marriages again at AmericanAncestors.org (the NEHGS site) to see the actual pdf of the registers and get a good citation. [Massachusetts Marriages for 1891, 8:647] So I found two dates I didn't have before. Both records re-confirmed that these women were daughters of George and Olive Pinkham.
It also showed me that Eva probably had her daughter at age 15 and married at age 16, which she did out of state. This is not surprising as she would have been 13 at the death of her father in an asylum. Evidently teenagers acted out back then as they sometimes do now. Her older sister Carrie was 22 when she married and younger sister Martha was one month shy of 20. It was Martha's daughter that sent me my first genealogical letter. She noted incorrectly that Elsie was born in 1906, but clearly she is in the 1900 census age 9, in the 1910 census at age 19, and in the 1920 with her parents at age 28. She married between 1920 and 1930 where I lose her. My cousin said she died in 1963 as Elsie Myer. However, her father's death certificate says the informant was Elsie Benson. I've never followed up much to pin her down. I have her parent's estate papers and she was clearly Elsie Benson at that time.
So, I've dotted two more "i's."
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