Saturday, January 6, 2007

More UFO attempts

I posted three days ago about my search for the Robert Leroy Thompson family here.

UPDATE 7 January: Note that "UFO" refers to "Unidentified Family Origin" in the original post.

Sharon Elliott was kind enough to find another sighting of Leroy Thompson in a Shelby County TN hospital after WW 1, and commented that perhaps the birth date I have is incorrect - he may be younger.

I tried more searches tonight using only the given names:

1) Lois (and Loi* and Lou*) born 1924-28, with father Rob* (and Lee* and Ler*) and mother Lil* (and Lel*). Lois/Rob*/Lil* turned up 13 hits in the whole USA - none close to Thompson, and only one in TN. And a few more with the alternate spellings, but again nothing close.

2) My friend and her sister thinks the family was in Kingsport, Sullivan County, Tennessee in 1930, based on the birthplaces of the children (the one born in 1926 is still living). So - on the theory that the family is hiding under another surname - either intentionally or by an enumerator mistake - I searched Sullivan County TN for all Loi* (and Lou*) to see if I could uncover a family with about the right structure (father b. ca 1885, mother born ca 1900, daughter Gwen b. ca 1922, daughter Lois born ca 1926). There were 12 Lois hits, but none of them had the family structure. There were no Gwen hits at all.

3) Perhaps they all used their middle names? I searched for (Gwen) Margaret and (Lois) Elizabeth in Sullivan County TN without success.

My next step is a line-by-line review of Kingsport, Sullivan County, TN to see if the family was missed by the indexers. Any bets on this? Any suggestions?

1 comment:

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

My only other suggestion would be to try the name Roy. My cousin Leroy went by Roy. They also could be listed by initials. I know I've found dates / ages can be very different from one census to the next.