Blog Post Seven

Photo by Mick Haupt

Finding the Blains, Part 2

A Series of Roadblocks

In the previous instalment I left off searching for William Blain’s obituary which I did not have. I had a tremendously difficult time finding any information on William’s death. I combed through two different newspaper databases searching for all spelling possibilities (Blain, Blaine, Blane) and had no luck finding his obituary. I searched the Manitoba Vital Statistics for a death record and came up empty handed, and since I knew where his daughter Susan was buried I took a chance and searched for William’s burial in the same cemetery but, once again, had no success. I kept searching, I opened up the search to the whole province of Manitoba for burial information and found absolutely nothing. Frustration had set in and I was ready to give up on William until my aunt graciously sent me all of her genealogical material. There it was! William Blain’s obituary was one of the items I received and the reason I wasn’t able to find it anywhere was because his names were listed backwards. As far as I know, his name was William John Blain with the spelling of Blain being pretty loose and different on all other sources I possess. His obituary referred to him as John W. Blane and the only confirmation of identity was the mention of his daughter Susan. Suddenly, from this obituary I knew:

·      William died in Winnipeg around the age of 87 years

·      His funeral was held in Anola, about 40 minutes east of Winnipeg, where he lived with Susan’s family

·      It was planned for William to be buried in the same cemetery as his daughter was many years later as I had previously considered.

William Blain’s obituary, likely from a Winnipeg newspaper, possibly from a smaller newspaper.

Questions & Answers & More Questions

What I still did not know was the specific year William died, only that it was after 1916 and the obituary did not have source information such as which paper it was published in or what year it was from. I also wondered why I hadn’t been able to find a burial record in the cemetery that I had searched in if he had actually been buried there. Since that particular cemetery is in a rural area there is no website that exists for it now so I knew there were only 2 websites I could search for any information: Find A Grave (found here) and the Manitoba Genealogical Society (MGS) database. Find A Grave is an impressive database that relies on volunteered contributions of information, grave transcriptions, and photographs of headstones from users. Genealogical or historical societies are those wonderful people who perform the tedious task of cataloguing cemetery information among other monumental tasks for the sake of preservation. Since the sources I did have listed William’s name differently nearly every time I had to do several searches with all of the possible spellings:

·      Blain or Blaine or Blane

·      William John or William J

·      John William or John W

After all of those searches in the Find A Grave database I had absolutely no luck. My last hope was the MGS database and, after just a couple of searches, there it was! I got one result and it was for my William Blain! Despite not containing a lot of information the listing had some of the information that I needed, but did leave me with a few questions. I found the exact date of William’s death, 08 Jan 1918, as recorded by the cemetery. Plus, the listing included a spot for details about the headstone as far as what type it was. This is where I learned why I was not able to find anything on Find A Grave: William is buried in an unmarked grave. Now, I needed to consider the reasons as to why William was buried in an unmarked grave:

·      Could his family not afford a headstone?

·      What historical context can William’s death be placed in?

Search result from the Manitoba Genealogical Society’s database.

I also still hadn’t been able to find a death record for William; no headstone and no death record, why would that be? It’s entirely possible that Susan’s family would have been the ones responsible for handling William’s estate and burial and perhaps could not have afforded to pay for a headstone at that time. I needed to search for a probate under William’s name and consider what was happening in Winnipeg in 1918. The answer, I suspected, was the same thing that was happening around the world for nearly two years: the Spanish flu.