Historical Perspective

Do you ever put your family history into historical perspective? I try to. Sometimes it happens by accident.

The other day, I searched for a birth record for someone in the Iowa birth records at the Family Search record site* and I found a birth record for Ray Vaughan Coleman. Actually, I was looking for Minnie Percival. I found his mother, even though she was not the Minnie Percival I was looking for. And she was actually in my database being my distant cousin.

I discovered by looking at the records I had already pulled on this family that Ray was not in Iowa after the 1910 census. Or that is the last record I have of him in Iowa. I was lucky enough to find first a death notice on him dated December 7, 1973 in a copy of the Oregonian online at Genealogy Bank. When I went after the publication data for the paper, which can sometimes be found on the front page masthead, I found the following headline: Vice President Ford Takes Oath of Office.  For those of us born well before 1973, we will know that Gerald Ford took the place of Spiro Agnew, who resigned his office as Vice President. And I think we all knew that President Nixon probably would resign or be impeached before too long. These were historic if not ignominious times for our country. Gerald Ford would later succeed Nixon when he resigned in August 1974. Ford took the oath of office on December 6, 1973, Ray Coleman was buried the next day. Relevant to each other? Not really, but an interesting tidbit of history.


*Be prepared the pilot site is shutting down and everything will be transferred to the beta site Family Search. Make sure you get a log-in for this site, as you can't view most images until you do log in.

Copyright 2010, ACK for Gene Notes