We have a lot of information about the Elrod family in our database, but it is all scattered around. Being an old American family, they intermix quite a bit with the Douthits and Macombers and other old American family names. The family was very devout at one time, as where the two other families mentioned, and they went to church in many cities together. And well, you can image what happened to the kids! They intermarried a great deal!
So to start things, we added a new Elrod Family webpage and a link to it from the main directory page. Before adding any more people, we ran an index listing and came up with 552 people with the last name of Elrod. This is not a bad beginning! But in scanning the first page of people, we saw a merge of names that needed to be done. So now our list is going to shrink as it grows!
So before we get to the big news, we stop to merge some names.
First we found that Eli and Luanna Elrodâ??s children were marked as still living! This would be pretty hard to do since they were born in the 1850â??s, so we marked them as not living. Then we merged Edward I. Elrod, Stephen O. Elrod, and Alice N. Elrod. Edwardâ??s wife was listed as having a first name of Poindexter, which I thought was odd, and sure enough there was a note that it was her last name, so we also fixed that! Stephen O. Elrod had a similar problem. Hester Elrod had two of the same husbands. Luanna Elrod had her fatherâ??s name in a note, so that was entered as well.
Scanning page 2, we saw Charles H. Elrod had a double. But the situation was worse, and very much like the Eli Elrod family. So we marked the children (his siblings) as dead and merged Charles as well as Anna S. Elrod, Mary F. Elrod and Katie E. Elrod. Charles H. Elrodâ??s wife, Sarah, had a note with her parentâ??s names, so they were added too. Before leaving, we added John Oliverâ??s (Charlesâ?? dad) two other wives, which were in a note. With the added people as we go, we seem to be covering the lost ones due to merging!
As I look over the index for Elrod’s, I am now really concerned about my duplicate search program. Why are there so many Elrods that need to be merged? At any rate we see them, so we will merge them.
Going back to the beginning of the list, we have Aaltje Elrod, who has an extra husband.
Next we have Nicholson Elrod who has several duplicate children. To make matters worse, he has two wives and separate children listed under each wife. Plus, the children are mostly listed as alive, when this is impossible. So first off we emerged Albert M Elrod. Rather than list the painful details, let’s just say we cleaned up that family.
Annie Elrod was a duplicate and her brother Rufus Elrod. I almost missed Jason Elrod also. Well that finishes the stuff I noticed on the first page of Elrods! There are only 12 pages!!! Of course some of them are now merged, but what a deal! Why didnâ??t my merge program pick all this up?
We stopped to look over Benjamin Elrod, since he had three wives to make sure things were in order there. They looked OK, but we were able to add the parents of Sarah, since they were in a note.
Catharina Elrod had to be merged and a brother and nephew.
Page 2 done!
Daniel W. Elrod and wife were in twice. His brother and wife were listed as still living.
Dora B. Elrod needed to be merged, but when we found her, we see that her siblings are one big double family! So we set to work merging and organizing the children of William and Mary Elrod. Ok that was not so bad, apparently they had 15 children!
Harry Elrod had a double wife. I jumped through several changes, but after the big changes on the early pages, the rest were just of things already done.
Sarah D. Elrod had three husbands with the same name, but three different spellings!
Thomas Benton Elrod III had three wives two of which are easy mergers, but the third is a very different name, but she has the same wedding day as the other two!
With that, we have reduced the numbers, but that is fine! We will have to go through the list another time after the data is updated to make sure we got all we needed. I also need to do this with the other families! It is a great way to catch things the duplicate searches miss.
LaVaughn Elrod Zimmerâ??s Work
LaVaughn Elrod Zimmer has collected a bunch of her research and sent it to us so we can have the privilege of adding her work to our family tree. So over the upcoming days, we will be adding her work, and modifying some of what we have. We also hope to get into data collection for this family if the Lord tarries His return!
To help try to itemize the additions and changes we will list them below.
John Teter Elrod
To begin with she had added the added detail of the state of Germany which we added for John. She also had his foreign name! We added his father, and his wifeâ??s parents from her work. We did some digging and came up with a marriage date.
His son Wilhelm Elrod was expanded. From her work we added his birth date and death date as well as his marriage date. We could not find a Warwick, Maryland, but others have chosen Pennsylvania, so we used that. From One World Tree we got the years of his wifeâ??s birth and death and locations.
Johnâ??s son, Jeremiah Elrod was next. We added her marriage date and county. We also corrected the spelling of Jeremiah. She had the death date of Catherine, his wife, and we found the year of birth. We found his place of birth. We also had to redo our one wife and make her two people! We added Elizabeth his daughter while at it.
Jeremiahâ??s son Adam Elrod was modified, adding his state of birth. We found his year of death and state. Also his wifeâ??s year and state of birth and her parentâ??s names. She had the marriage date and county.
Jeremiahâ??s son, Jeremiah and his wife were next. She had the birthdate and year of marriage and information on a second wife. We found his state of birth and county of birth. We also added Pollyâ??s son. The second wife needed her name fixed. LaVaughn had the other wifeâ??s birth and death dates and locations and we found the city of her death.
Johnâ??s next son, Robert, had everything but an interesting fact that his wife was a widow before his marriage to her. We are changing his place of birth to Lancaster from Maryland. We also changed her birth date and added her death date.
For Johnâ??s daughter, Agneta, we had the same information.
For Johnâ??s son, Thomas, she had a birth year and note he died as a child.
For Johnâ??s daughter, Elizabeth, she had dates and places and husband information as well as additional name! We added to that her birth state and her husbands places as well as the location of their marriage, and her christening date. We added her husbandâ??s grave location.
For Johnâ??s daughter, Anna Catherine, she had her husband and year and county of marriage. To that we added the location of her birth.
Johnâ??s second wife now has parents and a previous husband. We found a birth year and location. Her children:
George Arendt Elrod. Birth was changed and note on christening was turned into an event.
John Teter Elrod now has extra data as well as his wife.
Maria Margaret Elrod has a husband.
Anna Margaretha Elrod had notes turned into events and her husband now has two proper names. Their children were added as well. We found the birth and death day and location for her husband as well. We added their gravestones and his parents too.
While setting up the cemetery, we added the details and headstones to Christian, Johnan, Johann Ludwig Beroth and Anna Elrod.
Instead of documenting every little thing, many details were added in this family improved.
Christopher Elrod senior
Using LaVaughnâ??s work and other resources this family was upgraded as well.
Next week we hope to continue entering information using her work as we work down the family tree.
