Correction! He was in Rhode Island!

In March of last year I did a post about a great grand uncle that I was told was hospitalized for most of his life. This information came direct from my Grandmother, who also told me that he was at the Northampton State Mental Hospital. I searched the census records at this location more than once, attempting to find him and assumed that he had died prior to 1920. After finding out that I couldn't get medical records from the state, I went off to search for information about the hospital this uncle was residing in. I then wrote a blog post about what I learned and went on to other things. I assumed that I'd never know more about my illusive uncle George Leeming. It's been proven to me yet again, don't always take someones word for it when given information and don't box your research into one area.

Since my Dad's passing in December, I've not had much desire to do any research. Possibly because I've not been involved in ANY research or touched the mountains of papers on my desk for more than two months. Yesterday I decided that I needed to go through that stack (at least one of them :-) and make some sense of where I was, what I was doing and where I needed to concentrate my efforts to get my 'mojo' back if you will.

Most of us know, if you start sorting a stack of papers, lots of questions come up .. "Oh, that's right, we were trying to find great Aunt Marge", or "who was this guy living with Great Granddad in 1910?" It's easy to get sidetracked onto a lead that you were following - which was okay for me in this case, because I had no idea what I wanted to do at this point. Something I came across was an obituary for my Great Grandfather that I had found on the Newspaper Archives site. Realizing that I'd not shown it to my Mom, I read it to her... "Joseph Leeming of 13 Temple Street died yesterday..... survived by brother George Leeming of Pawtucket.."
WAIT! as in Rhode Island? No wonder I couldn't find him! I quickly did a census search in 1920 and 1930 - behold, George Leeming was living at the Exeter School (R.I. School for the Feeble Minded) in both census years. So Grandma was incorrect - he'd not been in Massachusetts as she thought, but he was left in an institution in Rhode Island when the family moved. And now I knew that he was still living in 1950 when my Great Grandfather died. More research to be done on this one folks!