There is a type of genealogical problem that I think of as the shattered family. Something goes wrong, often a combination of poverty and the death of a parent, and family seems to fly apart, like shattering glass.
One of the best ways to recognize the person that one is researching, is to find them in a group that you recognize. Finding that one person is good, but is it the right person? Finding a whole group of people that all makes sense together is much better.
That is why the shattered family can cause such problems. One child with the right name, living in a household with people that aren’t clearly related, is interesting, but is it the right child? One shattered family that I have investigated eventually showed a pattern of possible siblings all living in different villages within thirty or so miles from one another. Were they the right children? It seems likely, but with only the surname, age and location to go by, it seems more like a shadow of what might have been.
In another family I have a passenger list, that lists that gives the names and ages of the father, the mother, their children and several people with the mother’s maiden names as their surname. In 1850 when I should have been able to look at the family one year after immigration, there is nothing. Rather, almost nothing. There is a girl working as a servant in Milwaukee that might be one of the daughters. Ten years later, there was a suspicious cluster of people in Milwaukee with the right surnames to be relatives, and the shattered family had been glued back together in Michigan. The mother and many of the children formed a household. For the father, I have found no death record, no probate, no grave, no entry in a mortality schedule, but by 1860 his wife was a widow. She was probably a widow by 1850.
In another case I was lucky enough to have a few letters that gave an idea of what was happening. The children’s father had died and left them destitute. Their mother remarried but it is clear from the letters, that something was seriously wrong in the new household. It was never made clear, but reading between the lines led to the conclusion that their stepfather did not want them around. The mother was also chronically ill, though the nature of the illness was left unsaid. One letter gave the names of the family that an eleven-year-old daughter was working for. Later I found that daughter using the surname of that family. Another letter told of the grandmother helping by taking the eight-year-old son on a trip to see if she could find someone to take him. Never sure of how much longer she had, the mother was lamenting that if a family was found for him, she would probably never see her son again.
That kind of view into a shattering family is so very rare. It gives a precious glimpse of what might have happened when other families shattered.