I thought I knew pretty much everything that there was to know about Thomas Augustine Jones given the documents that are available. So, color me surprised when I was going through San Francisco voting registers the other night and I found Thomas where he shouldn’t have been.
I knew that Thomas Jones lived with his daughter, Margaret, in 1900. I knew that he lived with her in 1906, the follow up and aftermath of the earthquake, and in 1910. I knew that he lived with her in 1920.
What I didn’t know is that he didn’t live with her all the years between 1910 and 1920. In analyzing the information on the 1912 and 1913 voter register logs, I realized that for those years, Thomas lived at 167 1/2 Chattanooga in San Francisco. That is where his daughter, Josephine (Jones) Pohley, and her family lived. He was 62 at the time and still working as a Blacksmith.
Now I have to wonder why? Was there something going on in the Jackson household that made Thomas step out for a couple of years? Was it because he had trouble finding work after the earthquake? Was this the case of a elderly family member going to live with various children for the last years of their life?
I don’t recall finding this information in the San Francisco city directories. I suspect that means that I assumed Thomas was in Oakland with Margaret and family during those years and never bothered to look. I’m going to have to do another pass through those books to see how long he stayed in San Francisco and if it was the Pohley’s the entire time.
Here I’ve been researching this may since 1990 and I did not know this. Genealogy has a way of humbling you and reminding you that new information may be out there. All you have to do is find it.