Welcome to the family, little Leonard! Only 106 years late:)

Today, I was honored and blessed to add little Leonard Wolstenholme to our family tree on FamilySearch.org. Who is Leonard? He is my Grandma Barlow’s nephew. His mother, Mabel, is Grandma Barlow’s eldest sister. Unfortunately, Mabel died as a young 21 year-old the day she gave birth to Leonard in November 1908. Little Leonard tried holding on, but he also passed away after only 5 weeks of life. So why wasn’t he ever recorded on our family tree? I am not sure why, but fortunately it only took a few hours of research to find the defining link between mother and child.

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:

The second document, however, provided the golden answers to what I was searching for. This death certificate shows that Mabel and William Wolstenholme did have a child in Pleasant Green, Utah in November 2008 and that his name was Leonard Lee Wolstenholme! His death was also correctly shown in December of that same year.

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!