I was reading from the archives of The Essex Free Press, a local newspaper to see what was going on a century ago, what they weather was like, what the political climate was like and I ran across this sad obituary in the June 3, 1910 Essex Free Press in the County News:
She had suffered the inhumanity of being born into slavery and she suffered a painful and tragic death as well. I wonder if she had any happy moments in her life, or was it also filled with grief. The saddest part is that she was all alone in the world when she died, no one to remember her or bother to do her family history.
I thought that since she had no known relatives that I would try to find her family for her. I want to find out as much as I can about this woman, where she was from, where she was married, if she had any children, when she came to Canada etc.
I am going to start with her death record, it should have some information about where she was born.
Well, I didn’t find out too much information on the death record, I did learn that her full name was Mary Ann and that she must have been in agony for 11 hours.
The 1901 census should give me more information if she was here, maybe her husband was still alive. I’ll work back in the censuses to see if there were any children listed.
I’ll look for any marriage records, if I’m lucky, her parents’ names will be on it as well. Then I’ll look for any vital records for any of her children if she had any. I am hoping to at least find out what her maiden name was.
Filed under: Annie Fox sources, Juneteenth
Ancestral Notes 