Ureka!

Okay, my 6th sense kicked in BIG time. Way back last year (or even further back) my research took me to the Canadian Genealogy site and to the WWI search page. It is free to search and I thought I could possibly find my grandfather (on my mother’s side) in the records. I knew his full name (but not his actual birth date) and that he was born in the U.S. coming from Chicago and he served for Canada in WW1. During this search I found someone I thought could be the likely person. The problem I had was with the birth date listed. I counted back from 1948 when I knew he had died and went back 69 years almost 70 years. My uncles can tell you by memory to the day how old he was when he died. So if I counted back the number of years from 1948 then I came to 1878. I also knew that my grandfather was “much older” than my grandmother so this year of birth could have done the job. But alas my intuition was going with the Charles “Hendy” Wilson born in Chicago in July 1882 who registered in 1916 as a “single” man whose next of kin was his mother “Mrs. H. Wilson” of Chicago. I saved that record for future reference which you can see here. This document is quite public for anyone to be able to look up on the Government of Canada Genealogy web site.

So following through with my hunch, I went ahead and ordered the file on this person. You can imagine my excitement when I arrived home 2 or 3 weeks later to see a large envelope sticking obtrusively from my mail box. It felt like Christmas had just arrived and my gift was waiting for me to rip open. After refraining from immediately ripping it open (I had dinner to prepare) I finally got a few minutes to have a look at the contents. How exciting. Although there were no photos enclosed (which I hoped would confirm my deductions) there was a copy of a document which confirmed I was indeed correct and this was my grandfather. I discovered from the material my grandfather’s first wife’s name (Mary also known as Margaret) and that she lived in Vancouver at least up until my grandfather was discharged in 1919. Sometime between 1919 and 1921 she may have died (or perhaps they were divorced….. hmm). I’ve tried a little bit of hunting to try to determine this. What I do know is that my grandfather indicated he was a “widower” in 1921. Ah the mystery. Exciting stuff though. Now I have a bit more information to continue looking for his roots in Chicago. I did find out that he came up to Winnipeg with his first wife “Margaret” in 1910; they are captured in the 1911 Winnipeg census (which is also a public record). Exciting, exciting stuff. Now on to the great grandparents (Wilson)…. and perhaps siblings?