Where were we?
Oh yes. Dora, now without property (land or house, anyway) to her name, vanishes from the usual records by 1901. She is absent in the 1905 South Dakota Census, nowhere to be found in the 1910 Federal census, and my Grandmother had no more clues to give me to work with. She is mentioned in her mother, Bridget’s, obituary, which appeared in the Kalamazoo Gazette in August of 1910, claiming that she lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but I can find no trace of her in that place or time. Dora’s brother James dies in 1920, but there is no mention of her in his obituary. The story is much the same for her other siblings.
I decided to do something genealogists really shouldn’t be doing – working from the unknown to the unknown, which is the equivalent of playing pin the tail on the donkey, but I hit a point at which I was willing to try anything to answer my Grandmother’s question – what happened to Dora? I still had that one hint up my sleeve, that possible burial in San Bernardino. You’ve probably already guessed that a search on a big name website that indexes graves all around the United States didn’t help me any. A search in the California 1920 census turned up a maybe, but this woman was a nurse in San Diego. For those of you not familiar with California, it would take me at least two hours to drive from San Bernardino to San Diego, and that’s in 2018 when the cars can go…. Umm… well, whatever the speed limit is these days, anyway.
There was another hitch to be considered, researching Dora. If she had come to California, then she either came alone (kind of a big no-no for unmarried women in the 1910s), or she had gotten married along the way and had an entirely different name. South Dakota has an index of marriages beginning in 1905, but there was no sign of Dora in those records, or in California marriages, either. The Dora I had found was listed as single, and it’s certainly possible Dora never married. A broad search in California records rustled up a death index entry for Dora E Holland, born about 1862, listed in the death index for San Diego California. This woman died in June of 1935. The index doesn’t provide helpful information about the names of her parents, or her birthplace if any of that information were listed on the record at all. And it wasn’t the best match either, we had a middle initial that was off, and a birth year that was off by a couple years. You’d think that these would be no big deal and certainly not evidence that I was dealing with an entirely different person.
Remind me to tell you about James Jackson sometime.
Now, at this point, about the only way to find out if Dora E Holland was the Dora I was looking for was to order the death certificate. Now…. This was a few years ago and things were a bit tight at the time, so $21 for a maybe was tough to justify. But I had a hunch, and after much hemming and hawing, filled out the application for the death record. One truly nice thing about California is that we have an open record policy around here. So I gave the paperwork to my husband and asked him to stop at the San Diego County Clerk’s office that was on his way home from work. I practically ripped the certificate from his hands when he got home.
There she was. Dora B Holland (the E, it turns out, was a case of mistaken identity on behalf of the indexer), born in Ohio of 1862 to Cornelius Holland and Brigid Scanlan, both of Ireland. Her regular residence was the same as the 1920 census. So yes, there were a few errors on the record, but there was too much information that lined up for this to be anyone other than my girl. Best of all, there were some new clues on the record that led me straight to the cemetery she rests at, and I stopped by one afternoon to pay my respects and capture a photo of her headstone to send along to the other genealogists in the family.
Dora Bridget died in June of 1935. It took about 80 years, but finally, finally, we came to know where she went and where she is. I learned a lot about Dora during my efforts to track her down. I learned that like her parents before her, she struck out on her own and didn’t conform to the ridged expectations society set for her, had a successful career, and… oh did I forget to mention? In 1918, she registered to vote in California. Dora may very well have been part of the Suffragette movement, helping her nieces and grandnieces… all the way down the line to me… have a voice in our own government.
