The Dead and the Living

My mom and I call Wednesdays our family history day and shoot to work on it together every week, not always successfully but that is our goal. We have been working a dead end in our family history since she started in the 1980's with no luck.  We have been stuck on her great-great-grandparents, William Isaac Williams and Fanny Holcomb, on her father's maternal line.  A couple weeks ago, we happened upon a marriage record for William Williams to Lucinda F. Holcomb that was in the right place and at the right time, so we hoped it was them.  I took that hint and searched through every name in the county on the 1870 censuses (no previous computer generated searches had come up with anything useful) and finally had a breakthrough! 

Just below the middle of this picture you can see William Williams and his wife and 2 kids. Another exciting thing about this record is the sister-in-law listed with them, Emma Holcomb.  That is the first documentation I have found for the name Holcomb other than what my Grandpa Ben and Uncle Gene have told us from memory.  Also, listed a little above their family you can see Stacy Williams and 3 kids.  Many times neighbors with the same last name are related, so that gave me even more clues to run with. 

After some more searching manually through hundreds of names, I found him listed on a 1850 census with his mother Stacy and his father David and 7 siblings! So exciting!!!

Then I went back to the Holcomb family and found that her name is Lucinda Francis Holcomb, "Fanny".  So she is listed under different names on different census years, also the indexers recorded the record as Halcomb instead of Holcomb which is why it wouldn't come up in any searches.

Anyhow, I found her with her parents, James and Elizabeth Holcomb and 7 siblings in 1850 as well. 

There is almost always a pile of kids being silly in our house and KenaDee is usually in the middle of it.

We have a hole in our sofa and one of the older kids asked me why it keeps getting bigger.  I didn't know until that night when I saw Daniel sleeping like this.  

He had no idea that he had stuck his foot in the hole while sleeping.  Ha Ha Ha!

The past couple of days there has been a lot of Lego building going on.  Love those happy faces!

This morning, sleepy Laney hopped into her daddy's arms for some before school love. So sweet!