Lola, Effie, Hattie and Zadie

Lola's mother, Effie, died in Decatur, Illinois, in 1931. Her obituary lists many survivors in Decatur and Chicago, Illinois; Laramie, Wyoming; Los Angeles and Ontario, California. Since I'm hitting the dreaded brick walls with Lola, I began to focus my search on Effie's survivors in California.

I should add that I have established contact with a woman from the California Memorial Project and we were scheduled to talk this week, but conflicts prevented that and we are now scheduled to talk on Monday (hopefully).

Effie's obituary listed her surviving children as Lola of Los Angeles, CA and her daughter-in-law of Los Angeles, CA (odd that it didn't mention her son, William). It also mentioned her sisters, Hattie of Ontario, CA and Zadie of Los Angeles, CA.

This new focus led to my finding a few new things, and tomorrow I'm on the road early to the LA Registrar's office to pull more records.

Hattie:

Hattie was married had a son. On line, I found her husband's death record in Los Angeles in 1948 and her son's in Los Angeles in 1961. I couldn't find anything on Hattie. It was as if she, too, had vanished like Lola. I reached out to my favorite place for help - the Rootsweb.com / Ancestry.com messages boards for Los Angeles County and sure enough, a generous volunteer found Hattie's death in Los Angeles County in 1938.

Her son was newly married to in 1930 and they were living in Los Angeles (1930 census). I still do not know his bride's maiden name, but do know that she was born in California, as were her parents. I did find some children with the last name born in the 1930s and will pull birth records tomorrow to see if Hattie's son was their father. If so, I will have his wife's maiden name as well as new data to follow up on (the children). If not, people to eliminate and then revamp that search.

I was a bit torn with my new-found knowledge of Hattie's death. Surely her dying in 1938 would tell me that the informant was most likely her husband, who died 10 years later, and not Lola. Yes, I'm looking for any connection to Lola that might mention her because I know that even though it outwardly appears that she just vanished into oblivion, she didn't, and she is out there - somewhere.

Zadie:

Zadie was married and had four children - two sons and two daughters. I have been able to track three of the four kids pretty well. This week, I really focused hard on the "who, what, when..." of Zadie being in California in 1931. This was a woman that was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Illinois, married and moved to Kansas, then moved to Colorado and was even living with her husband in Colorado on the 1930 census. I finally found something to connect Zadie to California in the early 1930s! Through the exercise of attaching and researching the members of my on-line family tree, I found Zadie's oldest daughter with her married name in 1910. She and her young daughter were in Colorado, as were the other members of Zadie's immediate family. When I began to search for this daughter, I finally found her on the 1920 census and this provided the first name of her husband and also listed her daughter as she was listed in 1910.

When I added the first name of this Zadie's son-in-law, a new "world" opened up. I suddenly found something interesting. Zadie's 45 year old daughter, her husband, their daughter and their daughter's husband were all living in the same house in Los Angeles on the 1930 census! I then searched for Zadie's grandson-in-law and found his death in 1948. That was about all I could find on them. So now it looks like Zadie has vanished - I am still unable to find her death record, and I know that there is just no way she'd still be alive today. My final record search was for a possible great grandchild of Zadie's. I entered my search criteria for birth with Zadie's grandson-in-law's last name and her granddaughter's maiden name, and got a hit. I'll be pulling this birth record tomorrow, as well.

I will complete the day of research with a photo shoot trip by the last know house Lola lived in (at least from city directories of 1930-1932) and then to LA County Public Library downtown to search the newspaper archives of the newspaper that my great uncle Bill's wife/widow, Ann, worked for.

I am anxious to see addresses, informants and burial information. If the birth records prove to be correct, I will then have new people to search for that may be alive today, or have children alive, that just mind have stories and/or pictures. This is quite a journey and kind of like a good book. You want to finish it as quickly as possibly, yet, there is a fear of "what's next" once you do finish. That is kind of how I feel, but, I really want not much more at this this time than finding out what happened to Lola.