Another generation added to the tree!

Thanks to the ever growing snowball that is the FamilySearch indexing program, I've finally managed to track the Albert & Betty Wiggins family back to the 1910 US Census in Tennessee. I'd been stuck at 1920 for years without any new information. I'm starting to think that may have been due to indexing errors in the resources I was using, as well as less than flexible search capabilities.

In April of 1910, the Wiggins family was living in Gates in Lauderdale County. Gates is almost one of those sneeze-and-you-miss-it kind of towns, just south of Halls, in West Tennessee. The family was listed as Wiggin (no s). At the time, in 1920, the family consisted of Albert & Betty, and children Mattie, Pearl, Ada, Joe and Nell. This is wonderful to find as previously I had no idea when Nell was born, and the census placed her age at 7, which puts her birthdate somewhere around 1903.

Also, FamilySearch recently added a more complete index of Tennessee Death Records to their database, not really based on any of the previous efforts, this one abstracts all of the death certificates from 1914-1955. Though this new index, I was finally able to pin down death dates for both Albert and Betty, as well as filling in middle names (Thomas and Jane, respectively), birth dates, burial location (both listed as buried in Durhamville, Albert specifically at Elam, but having been to that cemetery, there was only one Wiggins stone, and it wasn't him, but now I have the funeral home's name and can maybe track that down more definitively), and most excitingly, Betty's parents names! And since Betty died in Memphis in 1937, I was able to pull a copy of her death certificate from the Shelby County Register of Deeds website and see it for myself!

(click to view larger)

Elizabeth Jane "Betty" Jackson was the daughter of Ben and Eliza Jackson, both born in North Carolina. Based on Albert & Betty's oldest child's birthdate and place (Minnie, born somewhere in Tennessee in Aug 1882), that likely places the couples marriage around 1880-1881, probably somewhere in West Tennessee. Now I have to do a little more digging, but it's always exciting to add another generation to the family tree!

I've updated my tree on WorldConnect, so you can follow this link to Albert Wiggins:

Albert Thomas Wiggins 1864-1942)