Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 3 - Branching Out (part 2)

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In my last "Steps to Researching My Family History" (SRMFH) post, I worked through several of the the hints for Thomas Deroser Dunn. I explained some of the information we can get from them and which types to prioritize first. In this post, I am planning to at least process the hints for Alta Lee Dunn. If I find some more hints that need discussing, I'll touch on those, too. If not, I'll move on to the parents of Jeraline Boiles (the wife of Robert Marvin Dunn), so we can finish out that side of the branch.

As we talked about before, the parents of my paternal grandfather were Thomas Deroser Dunn and Alta Lee Williams.

Let's take a look at the hints that have appeared for Altie, shall we. But first, it's time for a pop quiz:

• What are the three types of records in which we place the highest confidence (therefore, the highest priority)?

If you said, birth records, marriage and/or divorce records, and draft cards, you get a gold star. In looking through Altie's hints we find:

• no new birth records.

• Like with Tom, I found three marriage index hints for Altie (one of which belonged to your son Virgil). Since I have not been able to find an actual document with the correct marriage date, we will skip over these for now.

• While Altie was not drafted, she was listed on the draft card of her son Walter Thomas Dunn

From this card, we can get Walter's birthday and birthplace and where they were both living (which happened to be the same place at the time).

Well, we didn't get much help from our most reliable sources, so let's go on to the next tier...death records, obituaries, and cemetery headstones.

I looking through Altie's hints, there is a copy of her death certificate. As I have stated before (which can be verified by this document), death certificates are second hand information. Even though the informant was Altie's oldest son, many of the fields (like father's birthplace, mother's maiden name, and mother's birthplace) were unknown. This backs up the fact of the likelihood that this information is not as reliable as records containing information provided by the person to whom it refers. The main information that we can count on from this document is the death date (since the doctor includes the time and date of death) and location (even though it is not complete).

In addition to the death certificate, there is also a hint for a death index. Since this source of the information contained in this document comes from death certificates (which we already have for Altie), I will not discuss this one any further.

There were no hints containing obituaries or photos of a headstone.

One other type of death record that I haven't discussed before is called the Social Security Applications and Claims Index. This contains information submitted to the Social Security Administration upon someone's passing.

As you can see here, I am able to add a middle initial for her father and her mother's maiden name (both of which were not on her death certificate) from this record.

At this point, other than the marriage index records we are holding back on, there are only census records and Ancestry Member Trees left as hints for Altie. This is probably a good place to wrap up this post. I feel like we have now covered most of the document types so, unless there is some pertinent information we need to discuss, it should not take as much time and effort to go through hints for other people in the future.

In summary, I have now finished the hints for both sets of Robert Marvin Dunn's parents. In my next post, I will move on to the parents of Jeraline Boiles. I look forward to climbing higher in the ever expanding branches of my family tree with you next time. Before moving on to the parents of my maternal grandparents, I will take a deeper dive into the data we have discovered so far and start looking to incorporate this data into my Family Stories "site". I want to start adding the information we have just discovered into the site while it is still fresh on our minds. If you have any questions about anything I discussed in this post, please leave me a comment. If you have any suggestions on starting a new tree, feel free to share that information in a comment, as well.

{Next Post: Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 3 - Branching Out (part 3)}

Other related posts:
The Family History of Garrey C. Dunn, Jr. - This is my personal family history "site" on the blockchain. It is an example of the types of information you can incorporate into your own family history "site"
The Family History of Garrey C. Dunn, Jr. - How to Use This Site - You might not be familiar with some of the terminology I use or the navigation I have decided to incorporate in my family history "site" in order to help keep it organized. This page will help explain these parts of my "site".

Other posts in the Steps to Researching My Family History series:

Steps to Researching My Family History - Introduction
Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 1 - Building the Base
Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 2 - Expanding the Foundation
Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 3 - Branching Out (part 1)