Beatrice Mary Pray-Smith

I found her death certificate, and her son's birth certificate at the library today. Yay!

The interesting thing is that Albert Smith was born in the same county as Louise Marie Pray's children.

Maude M Pray and Marion I Stuart

I made a breakthrough!

My only lead on Marion Stuart was the marriage index I found. I have not gotten the marriage certificate yet, but when I looked in the Denver city directory, I didn't find any Marlon, but a Marion, who was a plasterer. I looked in earlier and later directory years and found he was only there from 1910-1912. I tried to find other family, but I found none living with him.

I did a search for the name in the Denver directory, and found a California Death Index for a Marion I Stuart born 29 Dec 1883 in Iowa and died 19 Mar 1973 in Los Angeles. What are the chances all the Pray sisters ended up in Los Angeles together????

Well, I continued to search using the specifics found from the California Death Index. and I found a census record with his family:

Stuart family starts on Line 27

And then I searched a little more and found his World War I Draft Registration Card. This item was GOLDEN because guess who was listed as the closest relative? That's right. Maudie.

 Now I know more about the husband, and I'm looking for them in censuses right now. I'll update later.

Time to Digitize

My husband and I attended the family history and genealogy class at sunday school today. It was great! Brother Ray is an amazing teacher (and I'm sure it helps that he's taught it for a LONG time). The biggest lesson I've learned is of the importance of digitizing.
We have the technology to make things digital, and it's benefits are manyfold:

1. Everyone can have a copy of Mom's scrapbooks, great-grandma's journals, etc.
2. Keeps contents of documents and/or photographs eternal through digital storage.
3. Takes up a TON less space (physical space, that is)
4. Encourages others to participate in the family history efforts because everyone has everything!

So I am going to start another blog for my immediate living family members. Basically for all those who are not labeled as "living" on our four generation sheets. At that blog, which I will make private so ask for an invitation, I will post stuff on our living family history. It will be awesome.

My end of the deal is to make things available to everyone. Your end of the deal is to give things to me to make available to everyone.

My request is for everyone to send me your photos, special documents, etc that you would like digitized. We just learned that here at our local family history center (in the BYU library) they have a high tech super awesome document/photo scanner. It's one that you can put a stack of photos and it takes them and scans them all for you. Talk about awesome. And so for our last year here in Provo, I would like to take advantage of that machine and digitize all of our family history. So send it my way.

I'l post the name of the blog once I get it started!

Updates on Beatrice Mary Pray-Smith

So, after I posted the last post, I continued to do research. Honestly, it bugs me to pieces when I can't find stuff I should be able to find.
So I decided to take a different approach. I was going to find out of the Beatrice Marie Pray from the California Death Index source posted previously was in fact THE Beatrice Mary Pray I was looking for.
So I started to look for her obituary. I knew she was living in Los Angeles. I decided to look in the Long Beach Independent, because that is the same newspaper that I found Louise Marie Pray's obituary. That would mean they were living close around the same time.

And sure enough, I found it:

It still wasn't conclusive, whether this was the same person I was looking for.

So I decided to keep looking.

Since I wasn't having much luck finding either the husband or wife, I decided to look for the son. This led me to find them rather quickly.

Family starts on Line 39

And I looked, and did some math to see if this was the family I was looking for:

William A Smith: age 52 born about 1878, married at age 32, about 1910

Beatrice: Age 42 born about 1888 (why had this record not shown up before?????), married at age 25, about 1913.

Albert Smith: born about 1915.

Since this family has a tendancy to have incorrect dates in the census, I realized this HAD to be the right people.

Now I'm going to get the death certificate for Beatrice and find more information on her son.