They Were Neighbors in 1920

The following post was published in March 2014 on my other (currently offline) blog.
It pays to look very closely at your ancestors' neighbors when looking at census records. As I combed through my Ancestry Shoebox (aka records I've saved for later use) I decided to look at the 1920 census record I'd saved for my great-great-grandmother Ida. She was married to John Wellman at the time and living in Flint, Michigan with him and their daughter, Goldie. As I've posted previously, Ida had five other kids from her first marriage to my great-great-grandfather Charles Tyrell. And when I reinspected the census record, I realized that one of Ida's grown-up kids was living on the same street with her own husband and kids! My great-grandparents, Viola and Thayer Graham, were living right next door on Rosetta Avenue.

I don't know how I didn't realize this sooner. I guess because I tend to do research in spurts - I'll work on stuff for days or weeks at a time and then leave it for several more weeks without doing anything. Things get forgotten, lost in the shuffle, overlooked. I know for a fact that I've looked at that exact same census record in the past when researching Thayer, but at that time, I wasn't looking for anything about Ida and didn't know anything about John Wellman yet, so never put two and two together.

Rosetta Avenue in Flint doesn't seem to exist anymore. I'd love to figure out where it was and take a look at the neighborhood on Google Street View. The 1917 Flint City Directory lists Ida and John as living on "ss Rosetta Ave 1 e of Industrial Ave". Industrial Avenue is still there according to Google Maps, but none of the cross streets are called Rosetta. I'll have to do some more digging and see if I can pin down the location.


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