Part 2: Hiram Fee

In this multi-part blog series, we examine “Hiram Fee” to educate genealogical research and deduction methods.

So you’re researching your ancestors and you’re trying to determine if your person of interest belongs in your family tree. In our last blog, we started with two basic steps to prevent you from adding someone that does not belong on your branch:

Step #1 advised to stop with you what you know (or, what you have). This is especially true if your person of interest shares a name with another local person. Step #2 advised to expand the family branches. This will help with uncovering multiple persons with the same name, and it will assist when coming across documents that describe a family relationship such as a step relative, niece, nephew, uncle, aunt, or cousin.

Once you’ve expanded the family branches, it’s time to move on to the next step:

STEP #3:  EXAMINE OTHER FAMILY TREES TO GATHER CLUES.

Note this step doesn’t state “copy other family trees.” Why? Because there are both good and bad trees out there. There are also branches that are not complete or properly vetted; information is there as a place holder based on Step #1 “Stop with what you know (or have).” I am guilty of having incomplete branches until I can properly research the information and draw the conclusions.

When mapping your family tree, there’s no reason to “reinvent the wheel” when you can start from the work of others. For this blog, we’ll focus on the fifteen public trees on Ancestry.com; however, there are many other public trees on other sites that you could (or should) examine. After looking through the fifteen trees, we now have possible names and dates for Hiram and for his parents, spouse(s), and children… as well as two locations:  Kentucky and Indiana.

First, click here to access a document that collected the data from all fifteen trees.

After analyzing the tree data, seven trees have his name as “Hiram J. Fee” while six have his name as “Hiram Jones Fee.” The other two are simply “Hiram Fee.”

Eight of them don’t have any parents listed. Of the remaining seven, two have Hiram’s parents as Hiram Fee and Rebecca Ann Jones, while the other five have his parents listed as Henderson Fee and Sarah Osborne. Thirteen of the trees have his spouse as Louisa Adeline Hensley (1878-1967). Two trees also show a second wife of Susan Alice Reed (1898-1967), and only one tree has a third wife, Sallie Farmer.

Almost all of the trees agree that Hiram had three sons (James Lawrence, Silas, Frank Finley, and Garrett Charles) and two daughters (Artie Lissie and Annie Ethel) with his wife Louisa. Tree #9 adds Alabama, Chester, and Dora. The two trees showing Hiram with wife Susan show two sons (Lee Clellan and Hiram) and a daughter (Verna). None of the trees show any children with his wife Sallie.

What do you do if your person of interest is not in any other family tree? Jump right to Step #4…

STEP #4:  GATHER EVIDENCE OF POSSIBILITIES.

This step entails taking the data in Step #3 and finding every possible birth, death, marriage, or legal record for every name in those trees. It also includes searching through newspaper articles and obituaries. At this stage, we’re not attaching those records to our trees… we’re simply trying to find all available data before we can make any conclusions.

I am a firm believer that those who ignore documents because it doesn’t fit a mental picture of what they thought they should find are those persons that encounter their brick walls faster than others.

So although we started our search with an 1880 federal census of a Hiram Fee, son of Henderson and Sarah Fee, we’ll want to search all possibilities. For example, we’ll also want to find any Hiram Fee’s associated with Hiram Fee and Rebecca Wells. We’ll also want to find a record to determine why Tree #13 has a birth date of 1862, regardless of how strongly we may feel that our Hiram was born in 1875 or 1876.

We don’t want to ignore any document we find. For example, if we find a document with “Granville R. Fee,” we don’t want to reject it because we have “Granville W. Fee” or “Granville White Fee” on our list.

We’ll want to locate records for every combination of his spouses’ name. Tree #4 and #5 indicate that Louisa married a “Collins.” Therefore, conducting a search for “Louisa Collins” may yield a death certificate, obituary, or other document with very important information on it.

A sample of collected documents can be viewed by clicking here.

As we conduct our records search, more names will appear. For those names, we may need to revert back to Step #1 and then follow steps two through four.

Coming up in Part 3 of this blog series, coming to conclusions with the data you’ve collected…

Philip Farmer is the author and publisher of “Edward Farmar and the Sons of Whitemarsh,” a 500-page, 155-year biographical history of Stephen Farmer’s family immigration from Ireland into Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Harlan County, Kentucky. Complete with bibliography and footnotes that supports the research. Check out LuLu’s current discounts which may save you money than purchasing through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, or other retailers.

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