As I was viewing the Reid’s family tree last night, I
noticed a warning that Mabel may have a duplicate record on FamilySearch, as
show here:
Wanting to help keep our Family Tree up-to-date, I wanted to
research to determine if the duplicate records were actually the same person
that existed on our family tree.
This is my family tree before adding little Leonard. Mabel
and her husband, William Wolstenholme, are shown having only one child - William
Arvel Wolstenholme, born in 1906.
![]() |
Reid Family Tree |
This picture shows the duplicate record. It shows a
Mabel Helen Reid on FamilySearch being married to a William Wolstenholme, but
their only child’s name is Leonard Lee Wolstenholme living in 1908. There is no record of their other child, William Arvel.
![]() |
Duplicate record of Mabel Helen Reid |
Could this
be the same Mabel as the one in my family tree? This record didn’t have any
birth dates or death dates for Mabel or William, but little Leonard definitely
seemed to fit the same time period as his parents. Looking closer, I noticed
that Leonard’s birth date matched exactly to the day that Mabel died as shown
on my family tree. Could that be the reason that Mabel died? Did she die giving
birth to Leonard? It seems likely since she was only 21 years old when she died,
but why wasn’t there any information about a baby? Neither was there was any documentation
anywhere on our family tree that showed the cause of death. Further research
was needed.
I jumped to Ancestry.com and viewed other people’s Reid
family trees. Not one of them had little Leonard on them. I then wanted to find
the cause of Mabel’s death. I searched for her death certificate, but couldn’t
find it at first. I had to eventually search through all the death certificates
for people who died in Utah in November 2008 and finally found it. The name on
the death certificate was “Wilstonhome” instead of Wolstenholme, thus
explaining why the simple search didn’t find it. The cause of death was
difficult to read, and didn’t really provide any information to me that her
death could have been caused due to complications with delivering a baby as
shown here:
![]() |
Mabel's Death Certificate |
The next step was to run searches on Ancestry’s 13 billion
records to find anything about Leonard. From experience, I have learned that you have to sometimes be creative when searching for records.
You have to vary the criteria to allow for misspellings and inconsistencies. After a few searches, I was finally
able to find two key documents. The first was a tombstone for “Lenard Lee Wolstenholme”.
Even though the spelling of the name was different, the date and place matched
up. It didn't show who his parents were though:
![]() |
Leonard's Death Certificate |
This death certificate provided the proof I needed to be
able to merge the duplicate record back to Mabel in our family tree. Little
Leonard now appears with his older brother on my Reid Family Tree. Welcome
Leonard, nice having you on our family tree!
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