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Who were Grandma Ostrander and Aunt Minnie?
In my dad’s baby book, my grandmother, Beatrice Lockwood Bates, listed the gifts he received for his first and second Christmases. Each year a present was received from Grandma Ostrander and one from Aunt Minnie Edwards, but no one in the family recognized these names. In this article, I describe discovering the family connection to…
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A Biographical Album… and a Train Robbery!
One of my early searches for family members on my grandmother’s side turned up an unexpected biography of her father and his family. In this article, I take a look at a biographical album that contains a profile of Franklin J. Holman, and a reference to a train robbery.
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Gilbert Bates Buys a Paige “36” Touring Car
On the second page of my dad’s baby book, my grandmother pasted a postcard photograph of the Bates family as it existed in 1914, sitting in an automobile. In this post, I describe details about the photograph and how I found that the automobile was a brand new Paige “36”.
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Finding My Father’s First Home – Santa Ana
When my father Edgar Lewis Bates passed away, I inherited the baby book that my grandmother Beatrice Bates had created for him. Inside the front cover, she had glued several postcard-sized photographs of family homes in Santa Ana, California. The first one she captioned “The place where Edgar Lewis Bates was born Sep 17 1913.”…
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Another Marriage, or Another Gilbert Bates?
In this post, I take a look at Gilbert Bates Jr (1843-1929), a son of my great-great-grandfather Gilbert Bates (1796-1880). He is sometimes shown online as having been married three times. Looking at the records of these marriages revealed some surprising information.