Here’s a short hint regarding a search I was having some difficulty with. The family name is “LISIEWISCZ” which, as I’m sure you can imagine, has a wide variety of spelling possibilities. After all, “speeiln duzn’t cownt” right?
So the point of the search was to find the obituary for a 1932 death. The obituary still needs to be found, but in the course of the search, I was able to figure out a few things. First, the family had immigrated in the early 1900’s. Since the family is still living in the general area, it was safe to think that they should have appeared in the 1940 census. Bingo! Off to Ancestry.com and there’s the widow (husband died in 1932) and her 4 children ranging in age from 21 down to 14. Since all of her neighbors reported that they lived in the same house in 1935, I thought there was a good chance they were also there in 1930. So, rather than look for yet another spelling variation, I did the FAN trick: Friends, Associates and Neighbors. The easiest was a neighbor.
English: (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Typical census record, un-associated with this blog post.
All of the families on this page of the 1940 census were farmers. So the next assumption was that there had to be a neighbor listed on that street who might also have appeared in the 1930 census 2 years prior to the alleged death date of the husband and father in this family. And so it was! I didn’t have to guess about “similar spellings” or “similar meanings” of the Eastern European surname. I simply used “Reynolds.” a neighbor in 1940 and, as it turns out, also a neighbor in 1930!
I’m not done yet tracking the obituary. Here’s the part where we say, “It’s not all on the internet!” Tomorrow, I’ll be at the archives and I check city directories which should get me closer to the actual death date. From there I can go to the microfilm of the local newspaper (not digitized or published on any newspaper website) and sort this one out to a happy conclusion!
