FamilySearch.org

http://www.familysearch.org

As you know, my genealogy road trip on January 1st was the result of my 2011 New Year’s resolution to return to genealogy and from some new information I uncovered about my grandfather (Joseph Chapple) and his parents (Louis and Carrie Blanton Chapple) in Ancestry.com. That road trip was very enlightening and provided me with more leads into the lives of the Chapples living in Houston, Texas during the early 1900’s.

Another online resource that I turned to after my road trip was FamilySearch.org. According to the website, FamilySearch.org is the largest genealogy organization in the world that has been actively gathering, preserving, and sharing genealogical records worldwide for 100 years. This official website is the ministry of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who are committed to helping people connect with their ancestors because they ” … believe that families are meant to be central to our lives, and that family relationships are intended to continue beyond this life.”

Well, I am very thankful for and to LDS for their commitment to preserving family history at FamilySearch.org. Because of their work, I learned that my grandfather wasn’t the only child born to my great grandparents as my mother and others believed all these years. A simple search of my great grandparents’ names resulted in me downloading, for free,  the death certificate of my grandfather’s little brother (my uncle) – Lewis Blanton Chapple. According to this certificate, baby Lewis was born October 19, 1910 and  he died at home (815 Schwartz Street in the Greater 5th Ward area of Houston) from congestion of the lungs on December 9, 1910.

This new information provided two important puzzle pieces with this family:
1) My grandfather wasn’t the only child of Louis and Carrie Chapple, but he was their only “living” child through the years;

2) When the 1910 US Census was taken in April of that year, this family was living in Freedman’s Town and Carrie was in the first trimester of her pregnancy with my uncle Lewis. But this death certificate verifies that this family had moved later that year to the 5th Ward area where their second child died from health complications. Knowing when this family moved is significant because it tells me exactly when they arrived in the 5th Ward area which is the community where my mother was born by mid-wife, lived, and thrived as a child, teenager, and young adult!

So consider making FamilySearch.org a part of your genealogy research this year and beyond too!

If you have the surname — Chapple–falling out your family tree (especially if they lived in the Houston area) let me hear from you because —  I’m Claiming Kin!

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Source Citation

“Texas Deaths, 1890-1976,” index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/JF3Y-CJW : accessed 04 Jan 2011), Lewis Blanton Chappel (1910).

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