Well. That's always a possibility when you're playing the odds. My problem has always been the shoddy work surrounding Albert. In one census (1900) he's listed as being born in 1878 (married at 15!) and in another census (1910) they give him a birth in 1874 with a status of widowed. I've never really trusted that one fully because his wife is definitely not dead and That's her birthday. Almost as if they were listing Mrs. Albert Thompson.
Anyway all my family trees are based on 1878 because that was the only known good record. I was okay with that, but something hasn't been sitting right.
So I went back to ancestry.com and took a really good look at that 1900 census again.
See it? Okay the whole thing is pretty messed up. Here...
Okay. The year is pretty clear (although Ida's got some correcting). Look at the birthday though. It's all garbled. It's been corrected and if you look really close someone wrote two BIG LOOPY 2's right over top of what looks like a 30. Also you'll notice from the 2 below in 25 that someone other than the original person wrote those 2's.
So some dolt put the year in wrong and someone back at headquarters adjusted the age to match!
So now things start to fall into place. I'm not looking for Albert born in 1878 and died somewhere around 1920! I'm looking for Albert born in 1870 and what do you know, there is an Albert born in 1870 in Alexandria (where the rest of the family is) and he dies around 1909 (right before the screwed up 1910 census!
All of my trees are wrong.
All of the sudden I found Albert's actual family. Things just started to fall into place.
I'll lay out a detailed list of this tree in the next post.
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