Gene Notes: On Getting More Information Than You Think You Want to Know.

I'm working on one of my dad's sidelines, the Webb family. To be truthful, his grandmother was a Webb, and the great aunt of one of the people I'm currently fixated on.

It started with a to do list item of finding an obituary for Alva C. Null, Sr. He died in Missouri in 1965, and I went looking for an obituary on him. Found a very nice one that gave the married name of his only daughter, Dixie Lee Dalton, who at the time of his death was living in Amarillo, Texas. No husband's name. Hmm.

Back to Ancestry, and searching for Dixie Lee Null, I find a marriage announcement for her, but not to a Dalton. Instead to William Anderson. I had to look twice because in 1940, when this even took place, Dixie was 15. The article was in an Odessa, Lafayette county, Missouri newspaper. Dixie lived in Clinton, Henry County, Missouri. So it looks like an elopement, but the notice of her marriage license was in the Clinton newspaper. Went looking again and found a marriage license and certificate in Jackson county, Missouri in 1943, under the name of Dixie Lee Anderson to Lloyd George Baugh. Okay, so now it looks like she was married three times - let's not forget Mr. Dalton.

Now I was on a roll. I searched for a marriage for Dixie Baugh to someone named Dalton. Found in the Kansas City Times, a marriage license issued in Wyandotte county, Kansas. It's bad enough I'm searching three Missouri counties, now a Kansas county. No marriage record, but she did indeed marry Clifford W. Dalton, sometime probably in 1945 since the license was issued July 10, maybe in Kansas. Here she is in 1945 at age 20 (paper says 22) on her third husband.

I found various articles about Dixie and Clifford for a few years, and then found his obituary in 1976 in Springfield, Greene county, Missouri. Then nothing.

Dixie was born in 1925. I figured somewhere along the line she either married again or passed. Take a guess?

I found husband number 4 in her obituary. Finding her obituary required me to search the funeral homes in the area for someone with a first name of Dixie. I found her in the online obituaries of Gorman-Scharpf Funeral Homes in Springfield. Indeed, she had married again, this time to Rev. Hugho Lewis, 22 years her junior. I don't have a marriage date for her and Hugho, but they were married in 1986 in time to host a 50th wedding anniversary for family - possibly his family since the names are not familiar.

After finding all this information, I thought it was time to look for divorce notices. While I never located in the newspapers a "divorce granted notice," I did find her filing for two divorces, the first and second husbands. And then a newspaper article about husband number two considering suicide, writing a note, taking a cab to the Kaw River, and then reconsidering.

As I enter all this information into my database, I think of how hard I've worked for it, and yet, how easy it was to find all this information. Years ago, I would have had to write to the newspaper, the county, the state to find what I wanted. Instead, with my internet connection and some subscriptions to online databases I was able to find all this out in a matter of days.

And in all my years of research, I've never seen anyone marry her husbands in alphabetical order!