Women in History – Part One

By Wanda Tucker~

If you read my post “What’s in a Name” from a few weeks back, I wrote about searching for a woman in the early 1900s in Wyoming, and the absolutely crazy ways the family name was spelled in various sources. When you are searching for a family, particularly one with a “foreign” name, it is amazing how hard it can be, just because of spelling errors.

Women present particular problems in genealogical research, especially when it comes to names. Or I should say the lack thereof. Prior to 1850, the United States Federal Census only named the head of household, and that was almost never a woman. Marriage records are notoriously spotty in the South due to burned-down courthouses and record loss. Same goes for land records, which even if you find them will only name a woman with her husband, hence with his last name already. Even in more modern times, as late as the 1900s as in the case above, the fate of a woman in history can be very difficult to determine.

In the case of Mary Budna Stiglitz, there was a marriage record which gave her maiden name, which is a great find. But shortly after she married, her husband died, and her son was born. This happened between the 1910 and 1920 censuses. By the 1920 census, Mary Stiglitz had vanished.

I learned in the course of this research that if you happen to be lucky enough to be researching an ancestor in Wyoming during the mining boom of the late 1800s to early 1900s, there is a bonanza of information to be had at the Wyoming Archives. I discovered that they have many newspapers of the period available and searchable online. What an awesome tool!

When I started searching these old newspapers, I quickly realized that unlike early East Coast and Southern U.S. newspapers, these papers didn’t just cover the wealthy, well-known, or well-to-do, or the people who lived “in town.” Every event, birth, death, mining accident, funeral, wedding, you-name-it was in there! It was a fascinating way to learn about the lives of the people who helped build the American West.

Low and behold, searching for Mary Stiglitz yielded results. I found her in a court report of a list of women receiving a “mother’s pension.” A little research online let me know that this was a fairly common practice in these Wild West mining towns, as miners died with appalling frequency, and nobody wanted a widow (or anyone else) getting too noisy about the circumstances under which these men worked. It was pretty brutal.

Anyway, I followed Mary along in the papers getting her pension renewed every few months, and then suddenly, nothing. Knowing a bit about how women got along in such times I speculated that she could have turned to prostitution to survive, but I had no evidence. I had already searched findagrave.com for a headstone in the vicinity and found nothing. If she re-married, I could find no record of it. I was stumped.

I was really happy that I had found anything at all about Mary after the death of her husband, but I wasn’t ready to give up quite yet. Having seen in the old newspapers that much of the activity in the town Mary lived in revolved around the churches, and having found another newspaper article about her husband’s death and subsequent funeral at a church there, I looked around online and found that the church where his service was held was still there! Of course, I called.

Don’t be shy about calling people in churches and libraries to ask for help. Most people are great, and some are stellar at finding information. From my phone call to the church, I found confirmation of the marriage record for Mary Budna and Jacob Stiglitz (which I had already, but backup never hurts), a baptism and birth date for their son, Jack, AND that Jack’s uncle-by-marriage (to his mother’s sister), Konstantine Podlesnik, had formally adopted him in 1919! That is some excellent information, because now I had an actual date by which Mary Stiglitz had either died, or given up her child. That is a phone call that paid off, big time.

As you can see, even in more recent history, finding information about a woman can be a real challenge. Thinking outside the box, looking at widows or mother’s pensions, adoptions, or guardianship records may help trace them forward. Tracing them backward to before they married is another challenge I will address on another day. For now, hooray for old newspapers and the Wyoming Archives!

More to come…