"More Moores" My Fantastic Find

My "Show and Tell" later today at the San Luis Obispo County Genealogical Society will be about more MOORES I found in August. This will be during a segment of the program reserved for members to share a recent "fantastic find".

I have long known that my paternal great-grandmother's parents were Andrew Jackson and Nancy (RICHARDSON) MOORE. However, trips to the courthouse and library in the county in which I believed them to have died did not disclose when exactly they died or in fact whether or not they actually died there. I knew they were in the 1880 Census and not in the one taken in 1900.

In August I was surfing in Ancestry.com. I was curious about whether researchers who posted family pictures there tended to give credit to those who were the source of those pictures. I knew that pictures I had posted on password protected sites, available only to family members, had subsequently shown up on Ancestry. I was pleased to discover that cousins do tend to acknowledge the source of the pictures they post. In the midst of my exploration, I made a serendipitous fantastic find. At first it was thumbnail size and I mistook it for a picture that had been give to me by a cousin several years ago; but when I enlarged it I realized it was a different picture taken the same day. [Click on the photos to see the entire picture in a new window.]

This picture had been posted on Ancestry by Kathy Reedy who I have since discovered is a second cousin-once removed. Her picture included only the men of the family--A. J. MOORE and all his sons. The picture I had received years before included Nancy and two of their three daughters as well:

I have always loved this picture for a variety of reasons. First of course because it included two of my great-great grandparents. I also have a fondness for it for some of the detail. Douglas MORSE, the second cousin who originally gave me the picture was fascinated by the mechanical wheelchair which seems advanced for the time--probably around 1890. In addition someone had forced all the men to take off their hats for the photograph. Note that several of them are stacked on the ledge in the upper right of the picture. But Papa would not part with his hat. Notice that he is holding his in both photos. And then there is the mischievous little girl who sneaked into the picture by climbing onto the ledge near where the hats were stacked.

After finding the photograph of the MOORE men in Kathy's tree, I was able to find a picture of the tombstone of A.J. and Nancy on Find A Grave. Now I knew where and when they died and it was right in the area in which I had been looking for years. They are not even listed in the tombstone list that had been done for their cemetery. I was also able to contact a fourth cousin who also descends from this couple and find the cemetery where A.J.'s parents were buried in another part of Missouri.

Through my newly found cousins I have found other old photos including one that included my great-grandmother along with her two sisters when they were much younger than in the above picture. I have also found pedigrees that extend both A.J.'s paternal and maternal lines back many generations. It will take me many years to verify some of these lines but I now have a treasure map to guide my search.