A family history puzzle

 Except for the fact that kicks this off, all information is publicly available.

There are two people - Rheta Bailey and John Ramsay - that we suspect of having the same mother, but different fathers. I got a tip from another researcher that a child of John Ramsay (who I will denote LR) shows a potential 1C1R (first cousin once removed) to someone I will denote WS.  All we have is that person's name; they have not responded to contact through the genealogy website.

The first thing I do is search my DNA matches to see if the surname Sudds shows up in any family trees.  There are no hits, which supports the idea that the link is due to the father of John Ramsay, and not his mother.  I do the same thing for my aunt's matches; there are two, but one has a private tree that I can't check, and the other's Sudds connection died in 1714 in England, so is too far back to be the connection I'm looking for.

I turn to newspaper archives to look for the surname "Sudds" in Windsor, Ontario. I'm rewarded by 1,286 hits, so I filter down to just BMD (birth, marriage, death) for 49 hits.

That's quite a few to check, so I make a side trip to Find-a-Grave to search for Sudds buried in Essex; there are 10, a manageable number.  I use that list to search the newspaper archives.

• Charles d. 1948, no hits
• Dorothy d. 2011: bingo, she has a child listed of the same name, plus his wife's name and their two children.  I have a candidate for my WS already!  The obituary doesn't list her birthday or age, but I will probably find that later, which will give me an idea of when WS might have been born.  I've made the mistake before of assuming the first candidate I came up with was the person I wanted, so I continue on.
•  Elsie d. 1980, no hits
• George d. 1999; found his bio, and as a bonus we know he lived in Cottam (the tiny four-corners town my grandparents lived in).
• Howard d. 2006; found his bio, lists siblings and children.
• Margaret d. 2017; found her bio. At this point I'm seeing the same names over and over, which confirms these are all part of the same extended family.
• Margie d. 2018; found bio.
• Olive d. 2002; found bio.
• Oscar d. 1998; also lists a child WS, and I was expecting to see the name Dorothy as his wife, but instead it's Joyce; I check Dorothy's obit again and sure enough, she was "Dorothy Joyce".
• Thomas d. 1993; husband of Margie above.

At this point I only have one candidate for my WS, so I turn to Ancestry; not because I love it that much, but it's a useful sandbox where I can mess around, and lots of people have trees input there that can help me quickly find connections.  I enter WS and his parents Dorothy Joyce Offer (I can see her maiden name since her obit says "Loving sister of Douglas Offer") and Oscar William Sudds with their death years, since I have them handy.  I hit refresh and Ancestry is already offering me parents for Dorothy, so I accept them.

I go back to the newspaper archives and search for Oscar Sudds specifically to find out more about him. I look for all articles, not just obituaries now, and there only a manageable 17 hits.  I find the obit of Joyce's mother in 1992; obits for Thomas, Howard, Dorothy, and Oscar that I've already seen; a list of guests at a wedding in 1960 that includes Oscar and a lot of other people with the Sudds name; obits for Marguerite Greene, a sister of Oscar; a lovely picture of three of the Sudds children at the Leamington Fair in 1932 (which tells me Oscar was born roughly 1920); an article detailing the wedding of Oscar and Joyce in 1950; and an engagement announcement for one of this daughters in 1971.

Annoyingly, Oscar's obituary doesn't name his parents. It does list his siblings; Marguerite Greene, George, Howard, Donna Waggott, Sarah Preston, Thomas, Norris, and Beatrice Stevens.  None of the obituaries I can find name their parents, which is slightly odd... close siblings, but not a happy childhood?

I realize I've made an oversight and go back to Find-a-Grave.  The main page listing gives his dates as "unknown-1998", but when I go to the details and open the picture, the headstone clearly gives his birth date as December 14, 1925.  I'll be able to find the family in the 1931 census, which was what I was hoping.  I add that to Ancestry and search the 1931 records.  I can't find him, but this is enough for Ancestry to suggest parents for him; Charles "Wilfred" Sudds and Elsie Olena Jinkerson.  I search Wilfred in the 1931 census and it pops right up; I can also see why I couldn't find Oscar, because the writing is barely legible for his name and the transcriber wrote it as "Assor".

At this point I can look at the two trees side by side.  I have my WS, with their parents and grandparents. And I have my contact LR with their tree, and I know that these two people should be related at the 1C1R level.  However... 1C1R should be different generations, and both these people have parents born between 1920 and 1930. It's also possible that they are half first cousins, meaning that they share one (but not two) grandparents.  My next step, then, is to check if either grandparents of my WS had children with two people; which means checking records for two marriages, since these people were born between 1880 and 1900, and for that time and place, children were only produced from marriages.

Oscar's parents were Charles "Wilfred" and Elsie, and I find a marriage record for them in 1911 when he was 29 - which is already a clue he might have been married before.  I check the census records for 1921 for any additional children I don't have from 1931 (Beatrice born 1913), and in the 1911 census I surprisingly see Elsie Jinkerson, age 16, a servant in the Sudds household.  That's a bit... icky, since he was 29.  I look for a birth record for their daughter Beatrice, but can't find it.  I accept the birth date of July 17, 1912 that someone else has in their tree, but I can't help wondering if that's a convenient fiction based on the marriage dates of October 2, 1911 for Wilfred and Elsie.  I will have to search the birth records for any with Elsie as mother; fortunately her maiden surname of Jinkerson is unusual.

I search for any record with mother "Elsie Jinkerson" in a ten-year period centred over 1917. Two familiar names pop up immediately; Norris b. Apr 30, 1915 and Thos. Amberson b. Jan 20, 1914, and the rest are not what I'm looking for.  I try removing the first name and narrowing in on just births in Ontario, but I end up getting children born to sisters of hers, which is not helpful. Oddly, Ancestry throws in a record for an illegitimate birth of George Anger, born April 29, 1917 in York to unmarried mother Sarah Anger. This unusual last name of "Anger" has popped up somewhere recently, so I take note of it to look into later.  No father is listed on the record.

There should be a birth record for their fourth child, George, since he was born in 1917 and the records up to and including 1917 are available for searching; but I don't have any luck there.  That's not so important, but where is Beatrice's birth record?  I am about to give up when I think to search just the day of her birth without any names, and there it is: Beatrice May Sudds, and the problem was that the mother's surname is scrawled and looks more like "Jenkinson", which isn't a Soundex equivalent and wasn't served up in the searches.  There's still an open question what Wilfred was up to before his marriage to Elsie, but I'm not likely to find anything, so I put it aside for now.

I turn to the other grandparents.  I don't easily see their marriage record, but fortunately Dorothy Joyce was born in 1930, so I should find her in the 1931 census.  There she is, age 1, with an older brother who is 8 (no kids in between?) and her mother, but no father.  I find her parents in 1921, no children yet. Her father emigrated in 1913, so they must have married between 1913 and 1921.  I go back to her father and find his death of TB in 1940, which leads me to a 1931 census record for someone with the same name, also emigrated in 1913, a patient in the same hospital where he died.  Poor guy.  Under the War Graves Registers it says his death was related to his military service.

At this point I have all four grandparents, so I can start to work my way down looking for potential parents of our unknown WS!  The fact that I'm looking for 1C1R when it should be a little further removed is nagging at me a bit, but I start looking at descendants of the two sets of grandparents.

I'm looking for men who could have fathered a child in the Windsor area in 1921.  Wilfred and Elsie's first son was born in 1914, which means a) he was too young and b) I've miscalculated on my generations.  But it's all good in the end, because it fixes my 1/2 first cousin problem.  Now my theory is that WS is of the younger generation, and it's his father Oscar Sudds who is first cousin to John Ramsay.  This means I'm looking at an MRCA (most recent common ancestor) one generation further back.

Ancestry is happy to suggest the other three couples I need; William Jinkerson and Evalena Griffith, who I notice were from Wallaceburg, Ontario but died in Bay City, Michigan (a similar trajectory to John Ramsay's birth mother), Sydney Offer's parents who were born and died in England, so a lower priority (unless a brother emigrated too); and Alfred Setterington and Amanda Thorpe, who were both born and died in Kent and Essex county, so definitely in the mix.

I start on the Sudds grandparents.  William was born on Wolfe Island, which explains all the graves and newspaper hits in Frontenac.  I already have him in the 1911 census and I can see he died in 1912, so I work backwards through the 1901, 1891, etc. census until I find the first one where he and Sarah have children, which is 1871.  I almost accidentally collapse two daughters until I realize that both "Mary" (age 9) and "Mary Jane" (age 5) are listed in the 1871 census, so they aren't the same person. Mary seems to have gone by "Elizabeth" later in life, which makes sense since that must have been confusing.

In any case, they had only three boys.  The oldest, Thomas, died in 1899, so before he could have fathered the person I'm looking for - but he will come back into play if I need to go another level down.    The second, William John, died in 1924 in Kent, Ontario.  I can't easily find him in the 1921 census, so I look for his wife, but she died in 1914.  That seems young, so I check the death certificate... poisoning?? that's not something I see often.  I can't make out what the first word is. William's obituary doesn't mention her or their six children, which is slightly odd. I start looking for the children in 1921;

• I can't find Ella (b. 1900), but she ended up in Michigan, so perhaps was gone by 1921. Married a Foster, appears as "Helen" on later records. Died 1930 in Detroit.
• I can't find Mabel (b. 1901), but she married and had her first child around 1921. Married a Gyles, died 1971 in Essex County.  Her marriage record in 1920 says she lives in Windsor.  Mabel attempted to cross the border into Detroit on August 14, 1916. She is 15 years and 11 months old, born in Wallaceburg, a laborer by occupation. She has never been in the US before, has paid her own passage, shows $1 and is going to visit a friend, Miss Margaret Bishop, at 235 Bullet (maybe? hard to read) in Detroit. She is 5 foot and 2 inches tall, with a dark complexion, brown hair, and brown eyes. The back of the card says "Debarred.  Under 16, and LPC (No appeal)".
• I can't find Ruby May (b. 1903), but I notice in passing her marriage record has a different/wrong last name for her mother, which is something to follow up on. Married a Baldwin.
• I can't find Geneva (b. 1906). Married name Purser, died 2001 in Wallaceburg.
• I can't find Belvia (b. 1909).  I go back later and search for her, and find a Belva Sudds (mistranscribed "Sadde", which is why I didn't find it at first) living in Enniskillen, Lambton East, with Alice and George Houson (sp?) in 1921. She is a lodger and 13 years old.  Married McLean or MacLean.
• I can't find Wilfred (b. 1910). This is puzzling, but not wholly unusual after a mother died, for the family to be elsewhere and not easily found.  Died 1976 in Napanee.

I've probably spend enough time on this family group, but I hesitate to move on, for some reason.  I try searching each name in the newspaper archives, with no hits except for Belva Sudds; she is mentioned in two social articles in 1939 in the Windsor Star attending a birthday party and wedding shower.  Wilfred brings up the obituary for Mabel, who married Charles Gyles.  It mentions not only siblings but where they live, which was common at the time (1971), so that might be a good avenue to follow up.

I wander back to Ancestry and find Ella May Sudds mentioned in the World War 1 attestation papers for her father. As of 1916 she is living in Wallaceburg, Ontario. This reminded me of the obit for their father, which I looked up again; it's in Windsor in 1924, and mentions only his sister, "Mrs. Jerome Thompson".  He enlisted in 1917 when his son was only 7; did that cause a rift in the family? 

Moving on, I start on the descendants of William Jinkerson and Evalena Griffith. Their first census as a married couple was in Swan Creek, Saginaw, Michigan. They have three little girls at home, Elsie, Hazel, and Lillie. Oddly, they are also enumerated in the 1901 census of Canada in Chatham. Once again I have trouble with the 1910/1911 and 1920/1921 census records; I can't find them in either Windsor or Michigan.  Their children:

1. Elsie, already thoroughly discussed. Obit mentions siblings Oscar, Hazel Underwood, Lillian Bowden, Evelena Phillips.  Also mentions she has 32 grandchildren and 42 great-grandchildren!
2. Hazel, b. 1896. Married Norman McFarlane, is living in Wallaceburg in 1921. Married for a second time in 1931 in Lucas, Ohio; I have seen this before when couples wanted to get married in secret; sure enough, her first husband is still alive and living in Canada in 1931. Died 1981 in Bangor, Bay, Michigan.  Her obit mentions two sisters, Ena and Lillie, and a brother Oscar.
3. Lillian. Married Ray Gates in 1917, divorced 1930, married James Bowden in 1933.