While scouring records for clues on Ancestry.com, I stumbled upon a document containing a familiar name: Martin C. Welch in Lucas County, Ohio. Lucas County claimed scads of Welches, as did Ottawa County next door. Many of these Welches descended from my 4x great-grandfather named Martin C. Welch. But something about this newly found record didn’t make sense: it declared the marriage of one Martin C. Welch to Dorothy Wiesters.

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TWO MYSTERIOUS INSCRIPTIONS, believed to have been penned by Garrison Smith Welch (my 3x great grandfather), were found in a family Bible. The Bible sat in the home of one of Garrison’s great-grandsons—an 80-year-old farmer in Union County, Ohio (Robert E. Welch, d. 2010). When I first talked with him on the phone, he was surprised to learn that our Welches were believed to be of Irish descent, rather than German. Garrison’s father was Martin C. Welch, and according to the 1880 US Census, Martin’s father was born in Ireland. Old farmer Bob had figured they were German, because the inscriptions were written in some form of German. One of them was even signed...

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TOSSING. TURNING. SLEEPLESS. It’s hard to sleep when Grandpa is talking to you. And my grandfather had been dead for 13 years....

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HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED if you are a few genes short of a double helix? Or does anyone in your family come from the shallow end of the gene pool? Well, it seems I’ve found a Welch who has lost every branch on her family tree....

On a mysterious death certificate for an Elizabeth Welch, her contributory cause of death is insanity. Parents are unknown. Birthdate is uncertain. But she died as a patient of Columbus State Hospital—also known as Lunatic Asylum of Ohio—in 1933...

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ONLY SINCE THE 1890s has fingerprinting become a useful means of identification. That is not to say, of course, that no one had fingerprints before then! In fact, I have reason to believe that I have the thumbprint of...

TAGS: Welch