RANCOUR

As part of a plan to get myself more organized with my genealogy, I am hoping to start sharing more of it as a way to find more cousins to connect with. Hopefully someone out there has the answers to some of my brick walls or some ideas on where to go next.

This year I decided to “actually” take part in Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” Challenge. Every year I follow along, read other blogs, and tell my husband that I will post something “soon” to the blog he set up for me several years ago.

This weeks’ prompt is aptly titled “first”. My first attempt at writing. My first blog post. My first 52 Ancestor post. I decided to write about my first search on my husband’s side of the family. His uncles, Lester and Chester Rancour. Note: The boys were not twins.

When my mother-in-law discovered I loved genealogy she asked me if I could find her two baby brothers’ burial locations. I’m not sure if she was testing my research skills or genuinely wanted to find them, but I took on the mission. She had no clue as to where they could be, other than somewhere in Minnesota, probably close to where her other siblings were born. We knew they were both born sometime between February 1927, when parents Lawrence Rancour and Malinda Buescher married, and 1931 when their next child was born. Since both parents are deceased I needed to turn to the records.

While adding information into the tree for this family I realized that the date of 1927, given to me by my mother-in-law for the marriage, was incorrect. The certificate actually says 1928.

We knew that the next 2 children born to Lawrence and Malinda were both born in or around Brainerd, Crow Wing County, Minnesota in 1931 and 1936 respectively. I looked for the family in the 1930 census, the last available census at the time. The search turned up nothing. Nothing for Brainerd, nothing for towns near Brainerd, nothing for the whole state of Minnesota. (In the time since this search was done several years ago, I have still not located a 1930 census for this family, even having searched page by page). I guess my research skills are lacking more than I thought!

After a phone conversation with their eldest child, Eldora, she told us she had copies of the boys’ death certificates that she could send to us. I was thinking that things couldn’t be this easy, could they?  When I got the certificates they both listed “Brainerd, Minn.” as a burial location, no cemetery name.

Armed with the details from the death certificates I added more data into my tree. Lester, listed simply as “Infant of”, born and died Stillborn 8 May 1928 and Chester born 13 September 1929 and died 2 October 1930.

Wait! Did I read that right? Lester was born full term in May 1928 and his parents were married in February 1928. Uh Oh! I’m not going to be very popular when I reveal this one! Luckily it was taken lightly by everyone involved but I was told to be very careful not to find too many skeletons.

My husband and I talked about what to do next and he, a non-genealogist, came up with the craziest of plans. Look for the Rancour name in a Google search and see what comes up. This was back in the days when Find-A-Grave wasn’t around and I was still very new to using a computer for genealogy research. I wasn’t quite sure how that would work but I was willing to give it a try. After some “poking and hoping” searches and refining our search parameters, creating a list of places to contact as we went, we found a website for the Evergreen Cemetery in Brainerd, Minnesota.

I never did write down the name of the link we found, however I still have a copy of the letter I received back from the Crow Wing County Historical Society. They sent me a listing from the 1931-32 Brainerd City Directory, and two obituaries for Chester. They said they looked but couldn’t find one for Lester. They also sent me a copy of the Evergreen Cemetery Annual Burial Report.

Both babies are listed right there on the report, Baby Rancour and Chester Rancom, the spelling of which has since been corrected. Buried in Block 25 Lot 18. They had no headstones.  

My husband called his mother and told her about what we had received in the mail. Within six months, a few phone calls to her siblings and a 3-way split of the bill, Eldora took a drive down to Brainerd from Hibbing, Minnesota and made sure that both babies had headstones placed on their graves.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed my first post.