Last week an acquaintance asked me to help locate her father. She'd had no contact with him since she was a toddler, after her parents separated/divorced in the early 1950s. She assumed he was deceased.

She gave me the name and birthdate of her deceased mother and the name of her father. (I'll exclude the surname here, but her parents' first names were George and Harriet.) She thought her paternal grandparents were named Lester and Ruth and that they may have been from Tennessee. She'd heard her father remarried and had a family. What an intriguing mystery and what a blessing to be involved in solving it!

A lucky start. Her parents (George and Harriet) were together in the 1950 census where I found them living with their young daughter in Oregon. Next door was a couple about 20 years older with the same surname, Leslie and Ruth. Leslie reported his birthplace as Oklahoma; Ruth was born in Missouri.

The dominoes fell quickly going backwards. Ancestry.com helped me fill in names and dates going back to George's grandparents and great-grandparents. Obituaries found at newspapers.com provided hints about relatives and where they lived. Ruth died in a car accident in 1953. Her husband was a passenger in the car; she was driving because her husband's eyesight was too poor to permit him to drive. Ruth was reported as being survived by two sons, George and Don.

Leslie was killed by a train in 1963. A newspaper article reported he was partially blind and taking a shortcut to a relative's house when struck by the train. A sister who lived in a nearby suburb survived him as did two sons, Donald of Sunnyville, CA, and George of Chicago, IL.

With that tidbit, I found George's 2019 obituary including the names of his deceased (second) wife, his three daughters and one son. The obit reported George was a grandfather to thirteen and a great-grandfather to ten. Obviously--but sadly--his obituary did not acknowledge his daughter and son (born after 1950) who live in Minnesota or their children. 

I now have lots of information to share with my friend, including a few photos I found posted on Ancestry and newspaper stories to fill in some blanks. While  I've done a fair amount of reverse genealogy over the years, I've not been successful (so far) in tracking down contact information for George's three daughters and son or brother Don. Finding living descendants is more difficult than it used to be.