A week or so ago, I blogged about my mystery relative, Rose (Caires) Vieira. I hope that someone would read the post and tell me what had happened to her. My cousin, Teresa, and I had put together what we had, which was very little. With our efforts exhausted we turned to the web for help.
It didn’t take long before our genealogy prayers were answered. Deb, a regular with the Portuguese Hawaiian Genealogy group on Facebook, saw my post. She is distantly related to the line. Deb did some research of her own and she was able to find what we could not…Rose’s immigration papers.
Let’s backtrack a bit. Rose’s parents migrated to Hawaii in the 1880s to work on a sugar plantation. While Rose’s siblings were easy to find, we could not find a trace of Rose in Hawaii. We had possibilities in Oakland, but without earlier records, it was difficult to say whether we were on the right track or not. I began to doubt that Rose ever made it to the sates. Maybe the Vieira’s were a relative from another side of the tree and our elders had gotten it confused.
Deb found Rose’s immigration records to Hawaii and then to California. Rose was left behind on Madeira by her parents. It was a common practice of the Madeiran and Azorean immigration who left for Hawaii. She came to Hawaii in 1906 on the SS Suveric with her husband, Jose Vieira, and her daughter, Maria. The document listed Rose’s step father as a contact, so we know that the family had been in communication.
The family lived in Wailuku, Maia in 1910. They left for Oakland, California on the SS Mongolia in 1915. It turns out that the Vieira family I was tracking in Oakland was the correct one.
I want to say thanks to Deb for finding these documents and to Teresa for working on it with me. Genealogy is so much more enjoyable when it’s shared, don’t you think?
This adventure proves the power of the genealogy community. Genealogy are the most giving, helpful people there are on this planet. It also proves that blogging plays a vital role in working on family trees. If I had not posted my problem in my blog, we would have never solved Rose’s mystery. It’s a great feeling to finally be able to put Rose into her proper place on the tree.
