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Archiver > PACAMBRI > 2005-06 > 1119322163
From:
Subject: Re: PACAMBRI-D Digest V05 #251
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 02:49:23 +0000
Hi everyone,
About the obituaries for William Curtis Mason and John H. Mason. I have received some replies and I thought I would share the whole story with the list.
I am trying to make contact with a living descendent of William Curtis Mason, or Curtis as the family called him. This will make the end of an 8 year quest to find out what happened to my mother's lost great uncle. William's mother died in childbirth and he stayed in PA with his mother's family while my great grandfather came to WI. My mother only heard stories about a visit to WI that Curtis made when he was a young married man, but no one really knew what happened to him. It has been a long and winding path to find him and if I can make contact with a living relative I will feel that the story is complete.
We had no leads on William other than that my GGGrandmother lived in Clearfield or Center Co. My mother and I searched records for years with very little luck, then I was looking through some old family papers and I found a recommendation for church membership from Bethel Baptist Church in Ebensburg for Simon Henry Mason. It was recommending him to the new congregation in Blairsville, PA. On almost a whim, I looked at the census for Cambria Co. and I found William Curtis Mason, a 6 mo. old baby living with the family of Evan Evans. Mary Evans turned out to be Curtis' mother and not Elizabeth whom everyone thought was his mother. I found Simon Henry miles away in Indiana Co. living with the Hatch family who were neighbors in Maine. I'm sure he had no idea of how to take care of an infant and still work, so the obvious thing was to let the grandparents take care of Curtis.
It still took me another 18 mos. to track Curtis in the rest of the census, especially the 1870 census. He was still living with his grandparents, but his last name was listed as Evans. I found that he had come out to WI to be with his father long enough at least to be found in the 1880 census. We always wondered why he came to visit his stepmother when he was an adult, but knowing that he lived with his father for a while made it make sense.
Now that I have finally traced Curtis and his son, John in all the census and have pieced together the skeleton of their lives, I would like very much to get in touch with someone from the family and share my side of the family story and find out theirs. Thanks for everyone's help. I'll let you know if I make it.
Anne Hawn Smith
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