You know, sometimes you just get a bee in your bonnet about something. For me, recently, it was trying to find out more about Edward Close’s second wife. Sounds obscure, right? Well, that’s kind of the point. It’s these little side quests in history that can really show you how things work, or don’t work, when you’re trying to piece together the past.
How It All Started
This whole thing kicked off because I was clearing out my late aunt’s attic. Mountains of stuff, you wouldn’t believe. And tucked away in a dusty old box of papers, I found this ancient-looking family tree chart, all handwritten, with names going way back. One branch had a “Close” connection, and there was a faded note next to an “Edward Close” mentioning a “second wife” but no name. Just a question mark. My aunt was a bit of a stickler for details, so that question mark just bugged me. It felt like an unsolved mystery she’d left behind. And with a bit more time on my hands lately since I decided to, let’s say, “explore early retirement” after my old company decided my face didn’t fit anymore, I figured, why not?
The Digging Process – My “Practice”
So, I fired up the old computer. First stop, the usual search engines. Typed in “Edward Close second wife.” And let me tell you, it wasn’t exactly front-page news. You get a lot of noise, a lot of famous Edwards, a lot of famous Closes, but nailing down this specific Edward Close and then his second wife? That’s where the real work begins.
- Initial Searches: Just broad strokes. Got a few hits for various Edward Closes throughout history. Had to start trying to narrow it down by potential time period or location if I could glean anything from my aunt’s chart (which wasn’t much, to be honest).
- Genealogy Sites: Then I moved on to the big genealogy websites. You know the ones. Some are free, some want your arm and a leg for a subscription. I tried the free trials, poked around the free record collections. This is where you can sometimes strike gold, or just spend hours sifting through census records, marriage certificates, and parish registers. Lots of dead ends here. You find an Edward Close, but is it THE Edward Close? Is the timeline right? Does it mention a second marriage?
- Historical Societies & Archives: I even started looking into online archives of historical societies, local history groups. Sometimes they have digitized records or family histories that haven’t made it to the big commercial sites. This involved a lot of patience, reading through scanned documents that were often hard to decipher. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, you know.
- Cross-Referencing: The key thing, I found, is cross-referencing. You might find a name here, a date there, a location somewhere else. You have to try and weave it all together. It’s like being a detective, but with much older clues and fewer fingerprints.
It was a real slog, I tell you. One evening, I was so deep into it, I forgot about dinner until my stomach started yelling at me. You find so many Edward Closes, and so many potential second wives for so many different people. It’s easy to go down the wrong path for hours.
What I Found (Or Didn’t)
So, after all that digging, what about the Edward Close from my aunt’s chart and his mysterious second wife? Well, the truth is, for that specific one, the trail went a bit cold. I found a few promising leads for an Edward Close from roughly the right period who did remarry, but a definitive link back to my aunt’s specific lineage? Still a bit murky. Sometimes that’s just how it is with these things, especially if they weren’t particularly prominent folks.
What I did learn, though, was a heck of a lot about the process. It’s not like TV where they just type a name and the whole life story pops up. Real historical detective work, even for something as seemingly simple as a name, is painstaking. It’s about patience, knowing where to look (and where not to waste your time), and accepting that sometimes, you just don’t find all the answers. That question mark on my aunt’s chart? It might just stay a question mark, and that’s okay. The practice was in the trying, in the digging itself.
It reminded me of my old job, funnily enough. You’d get a problem, everyone would have a different idea, and you’d just have to grind it out, try different things, until something clicked or you realized you were chasing a ghost. This was just a much older, dustier kind of ghost.
