We all have them, those family members that simply cannot keep their feet–or the rest of themselves-in one place. Ever wandering, these individuals can be difficult to track in genealogical records. So what’s a genealogist to do? Searching every State in the Union or even every county in a State is often a fruitless and frustrating task. If you are tracing a person with a common name (John Smith, anyone?),then you end up with so many potential matches it could take a lifetime to sort them out.Compiling a timeline of the known dates and locations of our family member can yield a Hansel and Gretel-like path,and we follow their trail searching for breadcrumbs of records along the route they probably took to get from point A to point B. Too often,though, we rely only on records such as censuses and marriage records to fill in that timeline and show us the way, and that can leave big gaps of time to fill.This is the story of how I learned about my Great-Grand Uncle Robert Ronayne, how I discovered that a South Dakota born wanderer ended up practically in my own California backyard, and why he was here. Let me tell you a little about Robert Ronayne. He was born in 1893, the first son of Irishman John and Iowan Matilda. After three daughters, John must have been overjoyed to finally have a son to carry on the family name.Since education was extremely important to John and Matilda, Robert attended Northern State Normal and Industrial School in South Dakota for several years, and newspaper clippings indicate he also attended Creighton University in Nebraska.
WWI, however, saw him entering the US Army, and he caught glimpse of many States,including Texas and Missouri. By 1920 he was working for the electric company in his hometown, but 1930 he’d begun to wander, as the census finds him working for a publishing company in Wisconsin. And then the trail goes cold. Where did Robert go next? Did he change careers again? When the 1940 census was released to the public, my family was eager to see where he was… but no trace of him could be found. Searching the WWII “old man’s” draft card collection turned up a possible match for Robert, but in a state no one had ever connected to him–was it really our Robert? Or simply another man with the same name?You’d tend to think that Ronayne would be an easy name to trace, since it’s a less common name than say Smith or Jones. Unfortunately, this name is pronounced two different ways even within the family itself–Robert’s father and all of his siblings pronounced it as Ronan, in an effort to Americanize themselves, while his Uncle Michael and all of his family pronounced it the way it’s spelled,Ro-nayne. Now, imagine you’ve stopped at this house to record the family in the census, and you’re hearing this name being said, probably for the first time ever, with a heavy Irish brogue, and trying to figure out what to write down. I have found “Ronayne” spelled Ronan, Romaine, Ronaine, Ranagan–and that’s just for starters! Spelling variations like these can throw a real monkey wrench into genealogical research.Finding a person, even when you are sure of where they are living, can get sticky when you rely on an index if the name was spelled another way than what you are expecting. I have another story about how a variation in spelling caused me some problems… but that’s for another day.For now, let’s get back to Robert.In front of me was an ‘old man’s’ draft card, registration which was required of all men born between 28 April 1877 and 16 February 1897 after the US entered WWII following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The registration was for Robert (no middle name) Ronayne,which is a little bit off since Robert actually was Robert’s middle name! But the date and place of birth matched up with what we knew,and the name of“a person who will always know your address” matched his younger brother Timothy, who was living in Maryland. This Robert is living at a hotel in Riverside, California, and working for the US Government at Camp Haan. It looked really quite beautiful–except. Well, except my Grandmother, who knew her Uncle Robert quite well, had no idea at all that he had ever stepped foot in California, let alone worked here. She also couldn’t verify that her Uncle Timothy had ever lived in Maryland! Too good to be true? Perhaps. So I went back to the beginning.What else did I have about Robert? Not a lot. I saved the draft card into a “maybe” pile and moved on.Then one afternoon, while scanning some of the letters that Robert’s sister Pat wrote to their sister Margaret, I stumbled on a piece of information that turned out to be the key to solving the mystery.It’s a four-page letter filled with news and general chit-chat, as sisters are so often known for. Page two includes a single sentence that solved the mystery and opened the door to a new chapter of Robert’s life. It’s 1 January 1944, and Pat writes “Rob is in Riverside, California managing a U.S Army laundry and seems to be making out very well.”Here it was, then. The Robert who registered for the draft in 1942,who was working for the US Government, was in fact, our own Robert Ronayne. With this new piece to the puzzle, I wrote to the National Archives and to the special collections department at the Riverside Public Library, to see what they had about Camp Haan during WWII. Although I haven’t found Robert by name in those records yet, the city directories confirm he was living in Riverside for several years and learned that the men who trained at Camp Haan, which operated from January 1941 to June 1945,served in the European theater of the war with great honor. As a veteran of WWI, I’m sure Robert was proud of the men he almost certainly knew and may have become friends with.The lesson here is simple; don’t overlook the clues you have right in your own family records. I am so grateful my great-grandmother and grandmother saved that letter! This isn’t the only mystery that letter solved. But those are stories for another time…
