Monday, June 29, 2015

It's Always the Last Place You Look!

Of course it is...but sometimes you have to look a long time.

The challenge today was to find the death notice of my second great-grandmother, Abbie A. (Vaux) Smith (1844-1931), who died 11 September 1931 in San Diego.  I recalled seeing a newspaper clipping about twenty years ago and wanted to find a digitized version of it.

Since GenealogyBank has the San Diego newspapers, so this should be a piece of cake, right?  Just do a search in 1931 for Abbie Smith (or maybe Abigail, or Abbey) with San Diego as keywords to limit the search.  Nope, no luck.

I took out the given name Abbie and added the surname Carringer to the Keyword section, and had no success.

I took out the San Diego, as shown below:


There were only 23 matches.


Number 10 on the list above looks like the prize:


Yep, there she is!  It doesn't say too much:

"SMITH -- Sept. 11, 1931.  Abbie A. Smith,
mother of Mrs. Della A. Carringer and 
grandmother of Lyle L. Carringer and
Mrs. Eva De France and Mrs. Maybelle
Milner, all of this city; a native of
New York; age 86 years; Friends are
invited to attend services at Benbough's
Funeral Parlors, 7th and Date sts.; Sat-
urday at 4 p.m. Cremation, Benbough's
crematory.  Please omit flowers."

A source citation (using the RootsMagic source template for "Newspaper, Online Images":

"OBITUARY," [San Diego] Evening Tribune, 12 September 1931, page 18, column 1, Abbie A. Smith death notice; digital image, GenealogyBank (http://www.genealogybank.com : accessed 29 June 2015), Newspaper Archives.

Why couldn't I find this item with the first name?  Well, the print was so run together that the OCR read the name as Abble rather than Abbie.  A search using Abb* as the first name also provides the article.

I still haven't found Abbie's urnsite.  Since she was cremated, she may be at Cypress View Mausoleum in San Diego, which is where my great-grandparents and grandparents are inurned.  I need to look for Abbie's son, David D. Smith there also.

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Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver

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2 comments:

Michigan Girl said...

Good job finding her Randy. Sometimes we have to get very creative.

Kelly Waterman said...

Hello Randy, Nice find by the way, several of my Abigail's went by the nickname; Nabby in various records! :)