Reunited

A woman wrote me recently looking for more information about her grandfather, Donald Delos Carr, who was included in my Carr database at Rootsweb. It seems her grandfather became estranged from her part of the family sometime after World War II and her parents had lost track of him. She wanted to find him and any associated relatives. She gave me some details, which I used to do research in Social Security Death Index, newspaper article archives at Ancestry.com, and on the Internet.

She told me he would be 93 years old if he were alive today. And she provided this text related to a military award he received from the Canadians.

CARR, F/O Donald Delos (J23590) - Distinguished Flying Cross - No.428 Squadron - Award effective 2 October 1944 as per London Gazette dated 13 October 1944 and AFRO 2637/44 dated 8 December 1944. Born 1914; home in Fort William, Ontario; enlisted Port Arthur, 5 May 1941. Trained at No.7 BGS (graduated 18 December 1942) and No.4 AOS (graduated 5 February 1943). Commissioned 1943. Decoration sent by registered mail, 13 October 1949. No citation other than "completed...numerous operations against the enemy in the course of which [he has] invariably displayed the utmost fortitude, courage and devotion to duty". DHist file 181.009 D.3260 (RG.24 Vol.20637) has recommendation dated 11 July 1944 when he had flown 38 sorties (233 hours 10 minutes), 22 November 1943 to 21 June 1944. Part of this service with No.405 Squadron and included a crash on return from Berlin (30 January 1944) and aircraft damaged by enemy action (15 February 1944). As Bomb Aimer, this officer has attacked Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart,Ludwigshaven and other targets in France and Germany. Throughout his tour he has shown great steadiness and reliability and a high degree of skill, co-operating well at all times with his crew and giving invaluable aid to the navigator. For being very stead and reliable throughout many operations, I recommend the non-immediate award of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Using Ancestry. I was able to find an Associated Press article dated 16 June 1949 in the Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman that said Donald Carr of Rochester, NY was unable to attend the awards ceremonies in New York the evening before. The article said the Canadian Air Force awarded three Americans with the Canadian government's Distinguished Flying Cross for services rendered during World War II. Fellow recipients were Lewis Ogle and Charles Benton. (See article, below)
I found a likely candidiate for Donald's Social Security Death Index record.

Name: Donald D. Carr
SSN: xxx-xx-xxxx
Last Residence: 32907 Palm Bay, Brevard, Florida, United States of America
Born: 26 Sep 1914
Died: 18 Oct 2000
State (Year) SSN issued: New York (Before 1951 )

I told her that it looked like he lived in Palm Bay, FL for a while as there were a number of phone listings there. He had also apparently lived at one time in Ohio. The reference was undated but was probably from the late 1980s or 1990s.

Name: Donald D Carr
Birth Date: Sep 1914
Street address: 270 Brownsfell Dr
City: Columbus
County: Franklin
State: Ohio
Zip Code: 43235
Phone Number: 614
Record Number: 727274956

I came across a nice description of the DFC in Canada. It tells how many Canadians were given the award in each of the major wars, but it doesn't report how many Americans were given the award. And I found a page that describes the No 405 Squadron in which he served. [In case you can't sort out the abbreviations in Donald's write up, he trained at No 7 Bomber and Gunnery School (BGS) and No 4 Air Observer School (AOS).]

The woman checked obituaries with the assistance of a local library in Florida and found the following:

DONALD CARRPALM BAY -- Donald D. Carr, 86, died Wednesday, October 18, 2000 at Holmes Regional Medical Center. Mr. Carr was born in Savannah, N.Y. He was a pilot for the Royal Air Force, and a navigator for the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. He was also a member of the VFW. Survivors include his children, Peter Carr of Valkaria, Susan Otten of Columbus, Ohio, Charles Carr of Rochester, N.Y., Karen Rise of Newark, Del., and Colleen Smith of Raleigh, N.C.; 13 grandchildren; brother, Robert Carr of Savannah, N.Y.; and sisters, Millie Edy of London Ontario, Canada, Martha McCallum of Kingston, Ontario, Canada and Carol Baker of Vestal, N.Y. Memorial services will be at 1 p.m. Saturday, at Fountainhead Memorial Funeral Home in Palm Bay.

The woman who wrote was quite pleased to have reunited her family after many years. She thanked me for listing his name in my database and for helping her out.

UPDATE: I've edited the article to remove Donald Carr's Social Security Number at the request of relatives. The availability of these numbers on the Social Security Death Index has changed in recent years due to identity theft related to death records. Rootsweb no longer makes the records available, but Ancestry provides access to full records ten years after an individual's death and partial records that omit only the SSN for records less than ten years old. This death took place over a dozen years ago, but out of an abundance of caution I've edited out the number. The other information is easily retrieved through public records searches.

Some Popular Databases Lack Capacity for Updates and Corrections

I'm spoiled by Ancestry's genealogy site, which makes it easy for users to submit corrections to at least some of the indices. In the US Census database, for example, a user can submit a correction to how a name is indexed. The erroneous version remains, but a bubble appears next to it with the submitted correction, which is also searchable by users. Volunteers go through the submissions to make sure there are no nonsense corrections in the pile.

Not so Mapquest. It is woefully unresponsive to its users. And it has countless errors and omissions, so that lack of responsiveness is particularly problematic for all concerned. My nearby pancake house and grocery store are comfortably nestled just to the east of the junction of State Highways 35 and 36 in Keyport, NJ, but Mapquest shows IHOP and Super Stop and Shop blocks away. A quick switch from the Street Map to Aerial Map view shows any local where the shops really are. Not only are the shops in the wrong place on the maps, but the listings themselves are troublesome. Stop and Shop is listed in Union Beach, a town down the road, and IHOP isn't cross referenced as International House of Pancakes, so it stubbornly refuses to appear in the Mapquest search results unless you remember the acronym.

There's nothing I can do to make them update their listings. That's not to say that I can't offer corrections to Mapquest. That's another matter. But, like I said, it makes no difference in the end. I did that months ago with Mapquest regarding Sayrebrook Veterinary Hospital, which is located at the junction of Ernston Road and Main Street (Route 670) in Sayreville, NJ. Mapquest has the hospital -- yes, an emergency hospital -- marked on a vacant lot nearly a mile away near the Garden State Parkway. When I submitted a correction to Mapquest, they wrote back and said it might take a long while for them to do anything about it. They offered a short cut to the process, which involved faxing them a map with an X that marks the spot where the hospital belongs. I jumped through their hoops, but the hospital is still in the wrong place three months or so later.

As another example, as if you needed more, my cardiologist recently had the nerve to relocate to a street that Mapquest doesn' t know exists. That's reasonable enough in the short term, but there are now hundreds of addresses in what is a huge medical office park, complex after complex not mapped. Try the map and directions link at the listing for my cardiologist at Find a Physician. The link goes to the center of town, a default result that leads you nowhere.

I had to use Google to find another business (First Interstate Financial Corp) as my beacon to the new office park. It was considerable time and energy doing research. I landed on the general vicinity using Superpages maps. I still had to call the doctor's office to figure out where they were in relation to the other location, but at least I was in the ballpark.

Superpages understandably had my doctor's former address, which was mapped correctly, and it even had a second listing showing his new address, but, alas, it misrepresented the office site as being south of Monmouth Mall on Industrial Way, far from its correct location miles north. I noticed that Superpages offers a button for corrections right on the map, but who knows if they are any more responsive than Mapquest. I doubt it.

In the end, I suspect that it is relatively easy to create these online maps using bulk data and sell lots of advertising online, but it will be a bear to keep up with all the myriad changes that will ensue over the years. Will they just dump in new data periodically and the hell with the interim changes? Can places like Mapquest keep up? I suspect not. They'd have to let volunteers help and maybe they aren't creative enough to figure out how to manage it? Maybe the new generation of GPS customers -- using Tom-Toms and other devices -- will feed the beast? In the meantime, we're driving in circles looking for breakfast, rushing our sick pets to nowhere fast, wasting our grocery shopping time, and having a heart attack in utter despair as we can't find our doctors.

Planning Boards and the Census

I've been checking with local planning boards to see if anything can be done about the census designation (Census Designated Place, or CDP) for my town, Cliffwood Beach. I'm working on getting the Census Bureau to adjust the Cliffwood Beach CDP and Laurence Harbor CDP so that they more accurately reflect how Cliffwood Beach is part of two townships (Aberdeen and Old Bridge) and crosses between two counties (Monmouth and Middlesex). I'm of course trying to amend the Cliffwood Beach article at Wikipedia and get a proper map, but that can't be done if the Census Bureau doesn't agree with me. That's not good at all.

Monmouth County's Planning Board has a Research & Special Studies section that deals with the census, mapping, etc. I found a point of contact at the bottom of the page. For Middlesex County, their webpage was less definitive, so I went right to the Contacts List and found who I needed to talk to. I phoned both offices and was well received by each place. Monmouth said that the area is coordinated by the Census Bureau's Philadelphia Office and that nothing could really be done as long as Middlesex continued to define Laurence Harbor CDP to include the portion of Old Bridge that I think is better defined as part of Cliffwood Beach CDP. Middlesex wasn't sure whether a CDP could cross county lines. I'm now on Middlesex's contacts list regarding Census 2010 to include my input on the CDP border definitions. Cool.

American FactFinder is a great site for researching places using the resources of the US Census Bureau. Put a city and state into the search fields and you will get a data page with lots of hyperlinks to maps and data. The "reference map" link will take you to a dragable map of the region that includes the place you searched but a whole lot more information I found I didn't need, while the individual "map" links up and down the data page provide a more clearly defined map of the place you're looking at. Since I was interested in border definitions, the "map" hyperlinks worked best for me.

Documenting Email Correspondence in My Surname Database

I get lots of genealogy email. The deal I strike with those who write asking for my help with genealogy research is that I am allowed to post their queries and my responses online in my surname research database. If they are concerned about privacy, I edit out their email addresses or their names, whatever. And I edit out particularly sensitive or nonpertinent comments (I hate Aunt Mildred because she always loved my brother best) or exchanges (I've been staying up late doing genealogy lately and that really annoys my dog).

Recently, a woman wrote but added the caveat that I could use the information but not quote her email in any way. This would have put me in the odd position of doing particular research without noting what prompted me to do so. I was unwilling to accept her preconditions and I received a hostile response from the writer. She thought me ungrateful and petty and assured me she'd no longer waste my time with her valuable insights.

I occasionally strike a nerve with correspondents. I still haven't figured out whether some of them just rub me the wrong way, or maybe my responses are subject to my mood or the phase of the moon. I suspect the phase of the moon has something to do with what motivates some persons to write.

Letters have always been difficult to keep private. I have a nearly fifty year old letter between siblings that provides some quite personal insights into the upcoming breakup of a marriage. The letter sternly specifies that the recipient shall destroy the letter immediately after reading it. A cautionary tale, to be sure.

A genealogist must respect others' privacy in a wide array of scenarios -- graveyards, family picnics, family feuds, and sensitive correspondence -- but the need for documenting and archiving the past must be given due consideration as well. As I understand it, the Australians destroy their old census records rather than make them available for researchers. I shudder to think about it.