Two Ravens Genealogy Blog

N.B. The death certificate in this post was randomly selected from Ancestry. These are not client nor personal records.       When doing genealogy, one of the richest and most productive records we have at our disposal is the humble death certificate.  I particularly love finding death certificates for the sheer wealth of information they can provide to researchers.  Hint: Keep in mind, the information on the death certificate was provided by other people! They are sometimes wildly inaccurate, and represent what people around the subject believed to be the truth.     Obtaining a death certificate varies wildly depending on place and time. Some states, like Kansas, require that you send them proof of identity in the form of a copy of a drivers licence or a passport. Some also require proof of decendancy, which often takes the form of multiple birth certificates with parent names to prove that you are actually related to the person on the death certifica...

 

  The next question for me became who was Worth's "Indian wife"? The Barr family were clearly not Native American, that much was obvious. Furthermore, the sources that said he was married to a Native woman were his nephews, both of whom had known him and his wife.  The next clue was the 1930 US Federal Census. Worth, then 30, was renting a farm in Hay Springs, Nebraska, a tiny town close to Chadron and over 275 miles from his family in Plainview. He was married to a woman named Keva Morgan, and there were three sons: Norwood, Duane, and Delmer. Keva and all the children are listed as "Indian," and Keva was listed as being "Sioux-Full" which confirmed that he had indeed married a Native woman. He also listed his first marriage date as 1927, a fact that was clearly not the case; he had married Sadie Barr in 1919. So was this the date of his marriage to Keva?  Once I had a name, the rest fell into place. The 1934 Tribal Census, listed Keva, Worth, and the...

 Every family has its ghost: that one person who seems to have slipped in and out of this life with little family notice. Worth was one of ours. Asking my dad, Worth's nephew, about Worth when I was a teenager, I got a terse and uncharacteristically angry reply, "They got mad at him because he married an Indian." I came to understand that Dad wasn't upset with Worth, but the family.  Worth Henry Morgan was born in Iowa sometime in June of 1899, the son of William Henry Morgan and his wife Fawney Belle (Armstrong) Morgan. William Henry, known popularly as Henry, was spoken of as a "difficult" man. No specifics were given, but casual mentions of his difficult nature were occasionally dropped into conversations. Records show that a man with the same name had land seized in Missouri and sold to pay debt, land that had belonged to either Henry's maternal great grandfather or one of his uncles of the same name, or maybe both. It didn't matter anyway; Henry...

 Welcome to the official blog for Two Ravens Genealogical Services! Let me introduce myself:  I am Shannon Morgan McCabe, a professional genealogist located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I have the best job in the world! I get to research family trees for a living and spend my days helping people understand where they came from. Knowing where we come from helps us plan out our own futures, and in further posts I will give you concrete examples of how this has worked out in my own tree. The question I get asked a lot is "Two Ravens? How does that connect to genealogy?" It's a good question to be honest! Our mascots are in fact two mythological ravens, companions of the Norse god Odin, named Huginn and Muninn. Their job was to fly around the world and return to deliver news and information to the gods. In fact, the name Huginn means "thought" and Muninn means "memory," which is perfect for a genealogist. Genealogy requires liberal doses of both thought...