Tombstone Tuesday: Robert Lee (1895-1971) and Mabel Ada (1901-1991) Gober

 Robert Lee Gober (1895-1971) and Mabel Ada (Fulkerson) Gober (1901-1991) were my wife's great grandparents. The photograph below was taken July 3, 2015.

• At the age of 14, Mabel helped prevent a train wreck. Other husbands included Lester Berry (1898-1972) and James Samuel Usrey (1876-1929)
• Robert Gober was 6'4" tall. Here he is on the Benton, Missouri basketball team at age 18. He served in the army in WWI.

Amanuensis Monday: 1925 Trip of Myrtle Van Every

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another. 

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, newspaper articles, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them.

Below I transcribe an article found at Newspapers.com mentioning my maternal grandmother. It's very brief, but corroborates some photographs I have in my collection.

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El Paso, Texas

28 Jun 1925, Sun

Page 13

Myrtle Van Every, formerly of El Paso and now of St Louis, is visiting her aunt Mrs. A.A.. Benold, of 908 Octavia street Last week Miss Van Every visited her sister at Fort Hancock. She will leave soon for California, stopping at the Grand Canyon. She will also go over the Canadian Rockies while she is away

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Notes

1) Mrs. A. A. Benold (Minnie) was my grandmother's sister. Not her aunt. There were 16 years separating them in age. There were eight years separating my grandmother from her sister, Eva, who lived in Fort Hancock. 

2) I have some photographs from the Grand Canyon. I do not know who her companion was.

3) I also have a photograph I believe is from California. While I suspected she was in Hollywood from the caption, the article confirms she went to California as part of the same trip. I don't know her companions here, either. However, I do know she had first cousins living in California, and there is a good chance these may have been them. (Her father was one of over 20 siblings. While not all lived to adulthood, she had a lot of cousins.)

Tracking Down a Death Record

A search on a local genealogy society website uncovered a burial record for an infant in 1908. No given name, so I knew the child, if not stillborn, lived only a brief period of time.

Unfortunately, while the index survived, the actual microfilm records for the particular month in 1908 did not survive. 

So I contacted the cemetery. Only the book containing names and dates survived. The book with other information, such as parent names, did not. 

That left me contacting the County Clerk. I was trying to avoid that until I verified that the infant was a kin. There are a limited number of potential fathers with the surname in the area, but not all are related to me. And I really do not like spending money on documents for non relatives, even if it is minimal. And in this case it was $20 plus VitalChek’s processing fee, which I do not consider minimal.

I emailed the clerk and asked if they had any other process than VitalChek for non-certified copies. I got a very kind “Not usually, but I checked to see if we had the record, and there’s not much info on it. Here’s the scan. Happy New Year!” (Not exact wording.)

It never hurts to ask. The clerk was correct - there wasn’t much info, but it did have the birthplace for both parents. (Not their names - just the birthplaces.) If that info is correct, the infant was not related to me. Related to somebody, though, so I will save it in my files in case I ever run into a researcher for that family.