Wood County research

While visiting my family for a holiday week and having rented a car, I took the opportunity to travel to Bowling Green, Ohio, the county seat of Wood County, to conduct more research on my great-grandmother Leta, her marriages and her family.

I hoped to acquire more information on the birth dates of a couple of her siblings, particularly David (or Fred) who disappeared when he was about 13, and Mabel whose birthdate comes too quickly after brother Aaron’s for her to have the same mother.

I also hoped to find more details on a couple of marriages and divorces, specifically the divorce of Leech Hoose (husband four), and the marriage and divorce of the mysterious Curtis (either husband five or six…unless there are other husband that I don’t know about yet).

As for the birth records, my time spent was a fruitless endeavor. Leta and her siblings were all born in the late 19^th century, and although the record books went back to the mid-1800s, there were very few listings for births in Lake Township. None of the eight Scott children were listed. According to one of the records clerks, the process of obtaining birth information at that time had persons representing the county go from house to house (since most children were born at home) and asking for the names, birthdates, genders, location and lineage of the children. However, it was not required for folks to comply.  So either David and Julia Scott refused to divulge the information or no one ever asked them.

Consequently, the mysteries of Mabel’s birth and whether David and Fred were the same person (and what happened to him if he was) continue.

As for marriages, I reviewed listings from 1928-1960 for marriage and divorce information, searched several different surnames for Leta—Scott, Mohr, Hoose, Freeman, Fields and Curtis—as well as husbands Fields and Curtis. There were no divorce records.

There was one marriage record – to Robert Fields of Montana, dated September 17, 1937. This is at least the answer to one of my questions. Up until this time, my information on this marriage was sketchy. I knew that Leta and Bob were married when he registered for the draft in 1942, and my father remembered that he and his mother-my grandmother and Leta’s daughter Vivian lived with them while his father-Vivian’s husband-Leta’s son-in-law Ed served during World War II. I also knew Leta’s marriage to Bob fields abruptly ended when he died of a heartache in June 1946. But I didn’t know—until finding this record—the date of their marriage. Interestingly, they married nearly one year to the day after her daughter Vivian and Ed married. This is also her second-longest marriage (after her first marriage to my great-grandfather Ralph Chetister). One more note: in the application for a marriage license, Leta declared that she was an office worker who had been married twice previously, but she had actually been married at least four times.