Mystery: Frances Virginia Sites
Today, while reviewing the massive amount of hints in my Ancestry account, I stumbled upon a death certificate for Frances Virginia (who had no last name for whatever reason in my tree), daughter of Hannah Bessie Crider and...Joseph Sites? According to her death certificate she does not have the same father as the rest of her siblings (at least, as far as I can tell right now).
Frances Virginia is my patrilineal 3rd great-aunt.
See, Hannah Bessie Crider was married to Frank Nesselrodt and at this point I can't find a record of her being married to someone else. Of course, you don't have to be married to someone in order to have a child and Frances is the oldest child as far as I can tell.
In the 1900 Census she is listed as Frank's daughter.
Peculiar is that Frances' middle initial is listed as 'F' rather than 'V' for Virginia, but you know... maybe since it was The Appalachian Mountains they pronounced it liked 'Firginia' (lol).
Anyways, the whole Nesselrodt / Nazelrod line is quite confusing. I'm not even sure if I have it right at this point.
So, according to the information provided by her daughter Avis Priest for the death certificate, Frances' father was Joseph Sites.
So many questions.
Now, according to everything I can find on Ancestry she was married to Samuel Daniel Halterman, but also on her death certificate it says she was married to Holmer Shoemaker. However, also according to her death certificate she was buried Halterman Cemetery in Mathias, West Virginia. I suppose, she must have got remarried at some point in her life.
Shoemakers also appear on my family tree, starting when my Susanna Shoemaker married my 4th great-grandfather, Reverend Lorenzo Dow Caldwell, probably in 1857.
Lorenzo Dow Caldwell
Anyhow, from this record I can also see that Frances lived in Broadway, Virginia at the time of her death. The main cause of her death was pneumonia and she had some other issues including being in a semi-coma, aphasia (apparently a language disorder), and hemiplegia (paralysis on one side of the body). Those issues were probably caused by the stroke she had 4 days before she died.
I don't usually do too much research into distant aunts and uncles, but this one definetly took me the down a rabbit hole, mostly due to trying to figure out what my 3x great-grandmother's relations were. I see this a lot with my patrilineal Appalachian family, where many of my ancestors will have a child or two outside of marriage from their spouse. While this seemed very taboo back then, I'm noticing it quite a bit in my tree, however Hannah Bessie could have been married prior to meeting Frank Nesselrodt and I just haven't found record of it yet.
