My Aunt Susie is awesome. I love her. She took the initiative to start grinding away at the Callaway family jewels. Through perseverance she revealed some very clever facets but the overall form isn't quite defined. It may never be fully defined because we may never polish out all the facets of our history.
To form a more complete jewel, documents and documentation is necessary. Too often genealogical researchers encounter Ancestry.com and start with census records. Yay! They find the individual they're looking for on the summary transcript which highlights the vital statistics: birth, marriage, death, location, etc... (see example search: "Irene Baker" in 1860 census).
People get so excited when they find this information. They record it... then they stop. Don't do that! There's so much more information you can tease out by clicking the document image. For instance, we learned that Irene Baker was a teacher. Her brother-in-law was a teacher.
How cool is that?! Wait, it gets better. Now digitally flipping a few pages forward and backwards I can learn a great deal about the community Irene lived in. Since I know that census takers usually work their way from the center of town out to the rural areas, I can extrapolate a layout of the community. Several pages before Irene's listing are 3 farmers, an overseer, 3 Methodist Ministers and 1 Bishop, a student, a housewife who boards students, a clerk, a law student, a Professor of Math, 5 teachers, a saddler and a planter. After Irene's listing is a seamstress, 9 farmers, 2 brick-masons, 3 teachers, a clerk, 2 wheelwrights, a laborer and a Methodist Minister. Therefore, Irene lived on the edge of an urban community, one in which the primary employment was the Methodist denomination and a school. Additionally, the teachers' gender are split evenly.
I don't know about you, but I'm curious about the school. Where did Irene teach? So I turned to Heritage Quest and Archive.org (see links on right) to find information. Spotlight! A History of Methodism in Alabama printed in 1893. There are several school listed, but the only one that fits in this time and place is the Centenary Institute. My 3 x Great-Grandmother was a teacher at a women's college.*
From all these details of information the facets of Irene's life grows. Isn't this more interesting than she was born in 1837 and was 22 at the time of the 1860 census?
*There are several other sources that were consulted, schools researched and eliminated. Through deductive reasoning, Centenary Institute was identified as the most logical choice. However, this may change if new evidence is discovered.
