Ancestry Magazine

One day, when she was eight years old, my grandmother Louie (Kennedy) Beard and her sisters Meredith, Theone, and Nettie decided to make pancakes for breakfast. Each girl made their own, not sharing with anyone; Meredith was particularly adamant about this. Louie, Theone, and Nettie finished their pancakes easily as they each made small batches. But not Meredith. She made so many she couldn’t finish them all—something their mother, Julia, explicitly told them not to do.
Facing the inevitable wrath of their mother, Meredith begged her sisters for help—Julia was absolutely not to be disobeyed. After a bit of convincing, the sisters agreed to help Meredith, but even together, the four girls couldn’t finish all of the pancakes Meredith had made. They needed a plan.
Fortunately, at the time girls wore bloomers under their skirts. So, thinking they could sneak the cooked but not-yet-eaten pancakes out of the house and feed them to the chickens, each girl stuffed pancakes up her bloomer legs and waddled out back to the chicken yard. Silently going to the back of the pen, behind the chicken coop where no one would see what was going on, the girls pulled out the pancakes and threw them to the hungry chickens. It was perfect. The chickens were thrilled and the evidence was sure to be gone.
There was, however, a slight problem. Anyone who has ever lived around chickens knows the birds become very noisy when food is thrown to them. All that squawking and all that cackling soon brought mother Julia to the yard to see what was causing the commotion. You can take it from there.
I love this story. And I know it’s one I might not have held onto had I not been looking specifically for my family’s females.
Researching the women in your family can be the most rewarding yet also the most trying. We are so intent on “doing the easy ones,” men’s lines with unusual surnames, that the “hard ones,” the women hidden behind the scene, are neglected. Or, at best, they’re treated with an “I’ll do that one later.”
Why do we bypass the women? Is the answer because they change their names with marriage and move somewhere foreign with their husband? Are they perceived as less interesting? (Talk to any teenage girl or even any mother—a woman’s life is rarely boring.) Or is it just that they’re not as easy to find in the types of records we’re accustomed to searching?
Often, we look for men because we can quickly track them down. You can follow a man through a court case or land purchase during times when women had no rights. You can read a long obituary for a man, while, if lucky, you’ll get a one line obit for the woman of the household, reading “Mrs. John Smith died yesterday.”
But clues to our female ancestors abound. The trick to getting more than just a name for a female is to dig a little deeper, get a story that’s out of the ordinary. From a high school yearbook, the Swanton, Ohio Hi-Life, I learned my mother placed in a district-wide biology test (not a trait that was passed on). I also found out that my mom and dad had a date the same night my mom appeared in the senior class play in 1946—how many people know exactly when their parents went out on a date? And in another yearbook I learned that a great aunt was on her school’s first women’s basketball team.
Town newspapers have provided me information in the form of the local gossip column. That’s where I discovered that another of my grandmothers had the mumps. From the date, I could figure out that one of her brothers brought the disease home from school.
Searching through my great-grandmother’s diary, I was able to follow her life during the Depression. The most fascinating part of the diary, however, was the insight into Great-Grandma’s humor, like when she mentioned that while her sister was visiting from New York, “Gertie watched while other family members worked.”
But the best stories of the female members of our families are probably the ones passed from generation to generation—like the pancake story. Or the story of my fourth great-grandmother Iven Rosanna (Kittlebarger) Hamp, who in the early 1830s made the long trip from Germany to the United States. While in the homeland, Ivey Rosanna was a “doctor.” When she arrived in America and settled in the northwest part of Ohio, Ivey Rosanna continued being a doctor. Family legend has it that many nights American Indians came to her cabin to have her help their family members. If they arrived during dinner, Ivey Rosanna’s guests would wait inside by the fire until the family finished eating. Then she would load her supplies and follow the American Indians to their homes to help her patients.
Even if official records and institutional files didn’t record your female ancestors as doing anything more than “keeping house,” you can bet there was a family member who did. And odds are good that the best stories weren’t just filed away—they were passed down, remembered, and shared again and again.