In between helping patrons at the desk, I have been focusing on the man who was the editor and owner of the Bloomington Republican newspaper during the civil war. I was not able to do any more transcribing when I was working the desk - the computers there just did not want to load the newspaper images, so I had to take a step back. I started looking into Clement Whitaker. Finding him in Bloomington in the 1860 census was easy enough, as was finding out where he was born as well as where he was in 1850 and 1870. I even found some of his marriage records. However, he was not in the 1880 census - but his family was. Naturally, I started looking for his death records, while simultaneously researching more into what happened to his wife and children. I wanted to follow his family tree. Both searches were futile. There was no record of Clement's death, no divorce record, no cemetery record, no nothing on what happened to Clement Whitaker after the 1870 census. It was driving me crazy. I then also could not find a single trace of his wife or three sons after the 1880 census. This family just fell off the map. I searched for hours, enlisting the help and advice from any librarian that came across my path, and nothing panned out.
Dirk, one of the librarians at MCPL that does some shifts in the Indiana Room, did what I did not even consider. He googled Clement. What a shocking notion! There was one record that popped up, and it did give a date for when he died, but there were no accompanying sources, and the site seemed a little unreliable. I had given up. This family had been put on this earth in the 1800's to make me insane a century and a half later. All of this happened yesterday during my shift. I spent about four hours, when not helping patrons, looking into this family and was running around in circles, spending a lot of time sighing and putting my hands on my hips - I guess I thought the Superman pose would get the brain juices circulating.
And then it happened. The revelation. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the Superman pose had nothing to do with it. Just my long suffering father who has to listen to my rambling on the phone.
I realized that all of the dates on the googled website were correct, so why didn't I just look at the newspaper following his supposed date of death to look for an obituary or death notice. It would only take a few minutes, and would be another thing to cross off of my list of where I looked. Of course, this revelation did not occur until 10 minutes after my shift ended and the library closed. I had to patiently wait until my shift today to act on my revelation. And there it was. A short write up about the death of Mr. Clement Whitaker in 1873 at the age of 47. There was not much information given, just that he seemed to have died of old age, or just plain sickness. No mention of his family, but I did not really need his family's information for my purposes as they had nothing to do with the newspaper. I do, however, still consider Mrs. Whitaker and her three sons to be my nemeses. It is amazing how such a small thing such as when a man died in the 1870's can become such a large issue. It is also amazing how relieved I felt once I finally found his death notice. I feel as though a large chapter of my life has been closed, when really it was only a chapter about a day long. And I owe it all to my dad, who probably cursed himself for answering the phone while trying to remodel the bathroom.
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