Genealogy Story – Finding Juanita

I had written in a few stories last year (http://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/02/genealogy-story-tracing-female-ancestors.html and http://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/02/genealogy-story-louis-russell.html) about my great-grandfather Louis Russell and his second wife Helen [Madigan] [Pulver] [Waldron] Russell. In the first story I had mentioned Helen’s granddaughter, Juanita Woodcock who lived with them while she was growing up. This is her story.

Juanita was the youngest daughter of Helen’s daughter Lola [Pulver] and her husband George Woodcock. Lola and George married in 1906 and had four daughters, Lola (1907), Ethel (1908), Ruby (1910), and Juanita (1914). In the 1910 census just the two older girls are with them, but also living in the same household are George’s mother Sarah, Lola’s sister Eva (18 at the time), and a “lodger” named Luther Peet (also 18). Eva and Luther eventually married.

Sometime around 1917 the family split up and the four daughters were “farmed out” to others. Lola was adopted by another family. I have not yet found what happened to Ethel and Ruby, but Juanita went to live with her grandmother and step-grandfather in Waterbury, CT. She lived with them until she came of age (she can be found there in the 1920 and 1930 census when she was 6 and 16 respectively). (I suspect that she left around the time that my father and aunt left Danbury and moved in with Louis and Helen around 1936/1937. My father remained there until he went off to WWII in 1944 and by the time he returned in 1946 both Louis and Helen had passed on.)

In the course of my genealogy research I was able to complete much of the family tree of Juanita’s aunt Eva and made contact with the great-granddaughter of Eva who lives in Massachusetts. Recently we had a phone conversation and I learned that she had in her possession several journals/diaries of Eva. She is going through them herself and has promised to share them with me so I can examine them as well.

A few days ago she said that she found an entry in the 1965 journal that said that Juanita had a new address – in New Milford NJ and she gave me the address. This was the key to solving the problem of what happened to Juanita. While I still don’t know that happened to her between the mid-1930’s and 1965, I know where she spent the last few decades of her life.

Doing a search for records in New Milford, NJ, and looking for anyone named Juanita, I found Juanita Kohlhase at the same address in New Milford that was in the diary. I then looked for further information on other Kohlhase family members at that same address and found two – Harry and David. In checking, I found that David was born in the 1950’s, but Harry was his father and was about Juanita’s age. I then located a family tree that had both Harry and David in it – and found Juanita (without a last name).

Harry’s first wife had passed away in 1963. Juanita moved to that house in June of 1965 and Harry and Juanita married in December of that year (according to the family tree I found). They lived together until 1986 when Juanita passed away (confirmed by her social security death record which has the correct date of birth for her). Her SS# was registered in NY when it was issued – which would have been sometime shortly after the SS system became live in around 1937 or 1938.

So it appears that Juanita moved to NY when she left the home of her grandparents in 1936 or so. Then in 1965 she moved to NJ where she lived out her life. Evidently she did remain in touch with the rest of the family during that time. I’m looking forward to finding further references to her in her aunt’s journals so I can fill in the missing pieces.

It’s amazing to me how just the finding of one tiny piece of information can help break through the brick wall of missing information. In this case it was a journal entry which had an exact address. When I recently tried to track down some of my high school friends for our upcoming 50^th high school reunion, it was things like remembering the exact date of someone’s birth (for a girl who was one day younger than I), or knowing what town someone moved to (for a friend who I rode the bus to/from school with). Genealogy is an amazing discovery process – and one that I will never be “done” with.