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 both of these individuals. In the process, I found a new family contact who had known my grandmother as a young woman. Read more »about Who were Grandma Ostrander and Aunt Minnie?
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”. Read more »about Gilbert Bates Buys a Paige “36” Touring Car
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.” On my annual trip to southern California, I located the house in the photograph and learned a bit about my family’s history in Santa Ana.
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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. Read more »about Another Marriage, or Another Gilbert Bates?