Friday, April 25, 2014

Finally got a break through on  Matilda C. Gillmore.  I had looked for her since finding out that she was a co-editor with Mary P. Lowe of  The New Woman Newspaper. I found a woman named Mathilda, born in Chamois Missouri, listed as a Mulatto, but Gillmore was her maiden name and later a Matilda showed up in the Topeka city directories listed as a journalist with a son whose name was Jesse Gillmore, so it meant that for her to be the right Gillmore she had to have kept her maiden name.  Nothing I did expanded the research on Matilda. I spent some time with Sherrita Camp, an African-American genealogist in Topeka who tried to help me.  We couldn’t find where Matilda came from or where, after six years she disappeared to. I finally decided to look at every notation in Ancestry.com that had a Matilda or an M. C. Gillmore or Gilmore, looking for a son named Jesse or Jessie. There were only 8050 notation to look at .  Maybe I would find a marriage, or death date. I went through 980 notations and quit for the day.

A week later I went to the Federal Archives in Kansas City and asked one of the volunteers, a woman named Evelyn Brissette who has spent 25 years doing geneology research to help me get back to the internet location that listed the 8050 Gillmores. She said “let me try one other thing, first.” She typed in Matilda’s son’s name in this manner,  Jess* the asterisk, a “wild card” and Kansas as a location where he lived. The third notation listed Jessie and his mother Matilda living in Lawrence, Kansas .  Matilda was listed as born in Sweden.  Her mother was Jennie Catherine Anderson also born in Sweden. Jennie and her husband ran a boarding house on Vermont Street.
Matilda was a journalist and  a printer.  I still haven’t found any marriage record  for Matilda C. Gillmore.  The Kansas Matlida moved with her mother and her son to Florida in 1900.  Her son grew up to own a printing shop in Virginia Beach, Virginia.She died in 1936 and is buried in Virginia Beach.

So that removed Matilda C. Gillmore from Missouri.  Strange the way my mind works, now I wonder what happened to the first Matilda C.  It is almost as if I knew her.

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