Looking For Lenora - Part I

My maternal grandmother, Florence Huldah (Webber) Currier, was a daughter of Samuel Ames Webber and Delora Adella (Haskell) Webber.  Florence, born in 1869 was one of nine offspring of Samuel and Delora and also had two older half brothers and a half sister born to Samuel and another wife. Old Sam was a propagating fellow to say the least, but that was not unusual for nineteenth century families to have many children. Especially farm families where every hand was welcome, if not necessary, to keep the farm running.  Sometimes I like to surf on my Ancestry.com tree to see if there are new hints that have developed that might reveal new facts on my ancestors. In particular I wanted to see if there was any new info that might help me determine the date of death for Delora. Up to this time I have never been able to locate any documentation that would confirm when she passed away. I knew from my grandmother's memoirs that her father Samuel died in 1880 but her mother was in too poor health to care for seven children ranging in age from 4 months to 15 years old (two of the nine had already left home).  Most of the children were relocated with relatives or friends, including my grandmother who was sent to live with a family in New Hampshire. But so far I have struck out finding any traces of Delora after her husband died and her children scattered into different homes.

One of the nice features of Ancestry.com membership is that it computer searches for possible links pertaining to all members in your tree. These searches are called "hints" and identified by little green fluttering leaves to catch your attention. There were two fluttering leaves on Delora that I immediately pursued when I saw them. Both hints turned out to be dead ends but if you don't look into them you could pass by some important info.  There are other avenues of search that I have tried and probably haven't even thought to try to determine Delora's fate but for now, the timing of the end of her life remains a mystery. But with nine children and three more sired by Samuel with another wife, there's plenty of other mysteries to search. One of those is Delora's oldest child, a daughter called Lenora born in 1863. There were leaves fluttering on Lenora's profile page too and since I don't know her date of death either, I decided to take a look at the hints and see what I could find. There were two historical record hints and one family tree hint (trees belonging to other Ancestry.com members that match the name of my ancestor).  Up to this point I had documented Lenora's birth year and residence on Federal Census reports in 1870 and 1930. In addition I had two newspaper clippings from my grandmother's files that supported Lenora's existence, one by listing her married name in 1930 and the other possibly referring to her residence in North Waterford, Maine in 1926. So I had already documented some information on her and I hoped the new hints might add more information on my grandmother's older sister. Lenora and my grandmother, by the way, were older sisters to Rollin Farquhar Webber, the same gentleman I have written about in some previous postings.

So now I have some hints to pursue on Lenora and hope I'll have more success on documenting information on her life than I did on her mother. The website profile page is pictured above with the hints circled at the top right and the newspaper clippings noted in the media gallery section to the left and below the hints. Looking for Lenora will continue as my search goes on.