The Daughter Who Wasn't There

     

     Looking at the 1920 Federal Census, for my 3rd great-uncle Benjamin Franklin Rood of my Vincent line, I noticed something quite odd.  A granddaughter had suddenly appeared in his household?  How peculiar; I knew his son and only child George Armstrong Rood never married, so from whence a grandchild?  Her name was Mae E. Johnson and she was 15 years old in 1920.  George too was living with his widowed father that year, in Sweden, NY and in pretty much every other census until both parent's deaths.  Bachelor George being Mae's father didn't make sense, though several online trees claimed that he was.  But why was her surname different than his?  An out of wedlock birth?

     I decided I needed to look at every census available for the Benjamin Rood family though I had already seen most of them.  Benjamin is not a direct line ancestor and I hadn't spent a great deal of time on him, after all, his only child George left no descendants... or did he?  The Rood's were residents of New York State which conducted a census of it's own every ten years on the 5's.  For example, Federal Census 1870, NYS Census 1875.  For some reason, New York did not do a census in 1885 and we all know what happened to the 1890 census.  That leaves a big gap in the records.  However, New York did take a census in the odd ball year of 1892--it's almost like they knew.  Without that 1892, it would have meant twenty years between censuses.  I'd viewed all the censuses for Benjamin except the 1892, so I took a look.  

     Holy Cow!  George was not an only child, Benjamin Rood and his wife Helen Burpee had a daughter!  Maryan ( Maryann, Marian?) C. Rood!  Age 12 in 1892!  She was born right after the census was taken in 1880 and appears in no other census with her parents.  I had no idea she even existed.  She had to be the parent of Mae E. Johnson.  Those of you with no state censuses to fall back on have probably run into this sort of thing before, but it was a surprise to me.

     Mae was born around 1905, so I checked the 1905 census and found her at age 1 with her parents John Johnson from Canada and Clarice Johnson from the USA.  Looking at the 1910 census there Mae was again,  bless her heart, six years old and living with John Johnson and his wife Clara.  Clara or Clarice could well be what the middle initial C in 1892 stood for.  Looking at the New York, County Marriages database at Ancestry, I found eighteen year old Mae Johnson's marriage to Louis J. Court, a man twice her age.  Her parents?  John Johnson and Clara Rood. I very nearly missed her, and Mae too.  I found a marriage record for Mae's mother in 1923 in the same Ancestry database, here she is going by the name Clarice M. Rood and gives her father's name as B F Rood and her mother as Helen Burpee, which fits exactly.  Don't you love the abandon with which our ancestors altered their names?  This marriage record also told me that Clarice and John Johnson divorced a mere week before Clarice turned around and married a man named Richard Grannon!  

     And those trees on Ancestry were blaming poor George.  Who's the scandalous one now?