My brick wall for my Hamilton’s are my great-great-grandparents. I knew my grandparents Claude Louis and Rowena Merle [Gibson] Hamilton, but both died by the time I was 6 or 7. My great-grandparents William Elmer and Carrie May [Cardwell] Hamilton, both died before I was born. My dad knew his grandmother, Carrie, who only died a few years before I was born. His grandfather, William, died when he was 7. But my grandfather, Claude, was 37 when his father William died, and he at least had information and knowledge, as did his sisters, Leona and Laura.

William Elmer’s parents were Franklin Pierce and Mary Pearl [Hill] Hamilton. Back to this point we are very solid, as family information and census records and death certificates attest. Franklin’s parents were Isaac and Abigail [Martin] Hamilton. We have them on the 1860 census, but they seem to have disappeared after that. Was there an epidemic? Did Isaac get killed in the Civil War? What about Abigail and Franklin’s two younger sisters? There is a Franklin Hamilton of the right age in 1870 in a school in Illinois, was this the right one? Then in 1880 we have Franklin and Mary and two children, one being William Elmer.

From there we have some of the Kansas State censuses, and the 1900 Federal Census. William Elmer and family are found on the 1910, 1920, and 1930 Federal Censuses. However, Franklin and Mary have not been found in 1910. Franklin died in 1912 in Missouri, and Mary died in 1924/5 in Oklahoma. The census takers make it hard to find ancestors, when they use initials for everyone. This seems very prevalent in Kansas for the head of household. In this case F. P. Hamilton. Even with the advances of the internet and indexes, if one keeps looking for Franklin, F. P. gets missed.

The only way to find out what happened to Isaac and family is to find a sibling of Isaac and/or Abigail, and try to track them down. Without some sort of paper trail, like land ownership, this is one brick wall that may never come down.

One high-tech hope was joining the Hamilton Surname DNA project. My dad joined in hopes of finding a distant cousin of a common ancestor. We ended up in Group X. Which means that no one else quite matches us. We did have a hit from someone who might be related within the last 500 years, but without a hint of a researched line with names to connect us, there is no way to know where to go from here.

The key to this is to gather every piece of information available on all the descendants of Isaac and Abigail, which at this point, only Franklin is known to have children, and he and Mary were prolific. As I organize what I have from my parents, I hope to find any hints or clues they may have missed. If they do not have copies of original records, I will have to be prepared to spend money to obtain them.