Maud born in England, Henry born in England
Maud interested me because she is the only ancestor in my husband's family to be born in Cairo, Egypt (when her father Albert William Slatter was posted there during his service in the Shropshire Light Infantry).
Henry had been born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England and made his way to Buffalo, New York before 1911. He married Maud in that year, obtaining a marriage license in Fort Erie, in Canada just across from Buffalo, but marrying in London, Ontario, where her family lived. They settled in Buffalo, New York.
In 1916, Henry and several partners took over a Buffalo automobile body manufacturing business that he had managed, incorporating it as Harvey Top and Body Company. He ran that business for at least a decade, during a boom period for automobiles (and a period of population growth for Buffalo).
Where's Harvey?
By the late 1920s, Harvey had disappeared from the records and the news. His wife Maud was mentioned in one child's marriage notice, but no Harvey. I didn't want to assume divorce, especially since Henry was noted as her late husband in Maud's obit of 1963. But where was he? There were all kinds of possibilities.
After failing to find any grave or death cert, I focused on newspaper research, especially searching for obits or business items, thinking that surely a man (with the distinctive name of Henry Canner Harvey) who ran a successful auto body and building business would be remembered at his death. I searched multiple newspaper databases plus freebie databases and all over the place. No obit and no death record that I could find, in Buffalo or anywhere. No news coverage of him after the late 1920s. Periodically, I repeated my searches. Nope.
Breakthrough: Full-Text Search
This month, after again fruitlessly searching all newspaper databases for an obit or news snippet, I turned to FamilySearch's full-text search. I searched "Henry Canner Harvey" and the top result was a detailed death cert from, of all places, Los Angeles, California. See image at top. Breakthrough!
This is most definitely the correct Henry, given that the informant is his wife Maud V. Harvey. He had cancer for a couple of years before he died after an operation for a bowel obstruction, sad to say. I was surprised that he was a commercial traveler (salesman) for building material for the past 6 years. Maybe his auto body business suffered after the big stock market crash of 1929 and the start of the Depression? Again, many possibilities, but clearly he was no longer associated with autos and now associated with building, a solid industry in California.
Curiously, the birth year on Harvey's cert is incorrect. Also, he and his wife had different residential addresses, according to this cert. And for some reason the names of his parents are "unknown." Even his birth place is "unknown." I again checked every newspaper database and found no obit, no mention, in California or New York, or anywhere.
Still, I now know what happened to Henry Canner Harvey and will plan to add him as "cremated" to Find a Grave, with a bite-sized bio of his entrepreneurial spirit.
"Possibilities" is this week's #52Ancestors genealogy prompt from Amy Johnson Crow.
