Both my maternal great-grandmothers were born in the United States, but their husbands, my great-grandfathers, were immigrants. First I will discuss my maternal grandmother’s mother, Clara Waldeck Mulder.
I lack a birth record for Clara. Michigan did not insist on birth records for many years, so my inability to find anything about her birth could be a victim of that bureaucratic lapse. Because I don’t have a birth record I do not know for sure if she even had a middle name. Her death record says NONE for middle name.
Clara’s married name, Clara Mulder, is extremely common in Michigan. Mulder is a Dutch name akin to the English Miller. Her parents and all siblings were Prussian immigrants, but she took on her husband’s Dutch name when she got married.
I’ve posted quite a bit about Clara. You can read more about Clara at My Great-Grandmother’s Lifetime of Service.
Clara was a farm wife, which is a sort of business person, and so she did not have a job which earns a salary. Since Social Security was instituted in 1935, when she was 51, she might have gotten a social security number if she had needed it for work. I do not believe she ever got her social security number. That is unfortunate because she might have applied with her place of birth (the town) and a middle name.
I already have her death certificate, which I have posted in the past, and census reports for 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940. There is no 1890 census, so my records for the census are complete for Clara. I did sponsor Clara’s page at Findagrave, but I do not manage the profile, as I do for Grandma and Grandpa. I also have Clara’s obituary (see the link above for the obit) and her headstone, which she shares with her husband–but I did not have these items loaded to my Ancestry account. I remedied that problem.
While I would love to find more information on Clara, I really could not add anything at this point, so I decided to request to manage Clara’s profile on Findagrave as my weekly task.
Clara is the third ancestor whose records I have combed for gaps, and I have updated my Ancestry records. However, I still have not transferred these records to another tree OR cleaned up my computer files for these individuals. Going to take the opportunity of a light job here to go do that! Hope the rest of your week goes very well!
Clara and Charles Mulder
50th wedding anniversary
The Family Kalamazoo 
Your doing a great job Luanne 🙂 I went back and looked at a few posts like ‘The Mulder Kids” and it was fun to see all the wonderful pictures you have ~
Thanks, Sharon! This is very enlightening to me to look for the holes in my research haha! I sure do have some great pix!
Love the idea of a “Fill in the Gaps” project !
Thank you so much! I am so glad I started doing this. I feel so much more organized already. Maybe once I do all the direct ancestors, I can even branch out ;).
There are always gaps to fill in. We write about our ancestors so others in the future will benefit from our research.
Yes, there will always be gaps. But so many of mine are just “stupid”–where I ignored some of the low-hanging fruit or avoided something I thought might be too hard hah. So now I am trying to round up the stuff that is available that I simply missed.
I also enjoy the great pictures you have. One place I’ve found unexpected success is in old newspaper archives. A surprising number of events ended up being reported in local newspapers.
Oh, I hear you! I love the old newspaper articles. They are so rich with information! Then when there is a gap in my genealogy bank newspapers I get frustrated because I want to be able to pull these up online since it is so easy!
I am enjoying this series of posts and hope someday I will be able to do a similar task.
You cannot have very many gaps, though, since every post you write is chockful of amazing documents, photos, and information.
Oh, there are gaps for my maternal side. I just don’t know that I will ever be able to fill them.
Right. There is a difference. I have so many lazy gaps. They aren’t that difficult. I was remiss.
Perhaps I was also. I was such a newbie when I started blogging, and I’ve learned so much along the way. I can only imagine what I missed back in 2013!
We learn on the ones closest to us and get better for the ones further away I guess.
Good point about the social security number.I never gave much thought to anyone NOT having a number. Affects just about everything.
Great post, Luanne.
After I wrote this, I wondered if maybe she didn’t hold a paying job at some point. It’s very possible that she did after her kids grew up. But I think the SS# would show up on Ancestry if she had one. Thank you, Sheila!
My mum was born at home in 1921. She was so frail that they didn’t expect her to survive, o the doctor didn’t bother to register her birth at City Hall. Made for lots of fun when she and my dad went to the UK, and she needed a passport. Fortunately, the government would accept a baptismal record.
She was baptized at home – the Lutheran pastor came around to the house, and used a cut glass candy dish. Years later, my sister’s son was also baptized at home (Lynn’s mother-in-law was too crippled with arthritis to leave the house), and they used the same glass dish.
That is so tiny–to fit in a candy dish!!! Obviously she did survive, so that is wonderful!
You have given me an idea! My guess is that Clara was baptized in the Lutheran church . . . and those records might be online. Thank you for your story and for your insights!
The picture is priceless. Truly. I wonder how many women in past eras don’t have easily found histories, or at least paper-trail histories, since they traditionally worked at home. It would be cool to travel through time and sit down and talk with Clara, wouldn’t it? Imagine the stories, the things we would learn. P.S. I went to college in Kalamazoo (Go, WMU!), it’s a great town.
Hey you, I knew you went to Western! LOL It is so frustrating searching for the women when researching family history. I feel that I am missing SO much. That is the main reason I wrote Kin Types. I couldn’t stand seeing the stories of the women ignored. Just the change of the surname can create a brick wall in research. I’d love to talk to Clara. I would have so much to talk to her about. According to my uncle, she was a really hard worker and then of course she was so involved in her leadership activities and i suspect a very intelligent woman. And my mom says she was a good cook, too ;). And look at all the changes she saw in her life, starting with growing up in an immigrant family.
I can’t wait to read your new book Malnourished!!!!!!!!!!
Oh, it’s so difficult when people didn’t have records. When I was doing my family trees, I hit that brick wall so many times as most of mine were born in countries that either didn’t keep records for Jews or the records were lost during wars. Hopefully (as I see from a comment above) you may be able to find more via church records.
Yes, I am experiencing first hand how difficult it is to find records of Jews who lived in “old Russia.” Ugh. What are were your relatives from?
Latvia, Ukraine and Bessarabia – when they were all part of Russia.
You have Ukraine in common with the gardener. So far I’m having more luck with southern Ukraine than northern.
My family are from a small area just outside Odessa, so probably a similar region.