The ancient Egyptians believed they would live forever after death as long as their name was remembered. So they wrote their names everywhere because they knew their descendants wouldn't remember the names of their ancestors.
Family historians and genealogists look for those traces, and in a sense bring people back to life.
The first traces to follow in US genealogy is census records. You find a person when he/she is first listed with his/her parents, and follow that person every 10 years until he/she dies. Every once in a while a person just "disappears" and can't be found in a census. The challenge, and the fun, is finding out why.
Sometimes he or she was just skipped in a census. My grandfather Villiger wasn't listed in the 1910 census. I knew exactly where he was living at the time and went down to the National Archives to look through the maps of the enumeration districts for that census. Sure enough, they showed his block wasn't included in any district. The borders were not contiguous in that part of East St. Louis. Of course he and his parents, brothers and sisters were all listed in the city directories for several years before and after 1910.
You look for the person's spouse, and if he or she is listed as widow or widower, you know the person died. But if he or she wasn't married, or you don't know who he/she married, it's more challenging yet.
Sometimes the census enumerator can't spell or the indexer has misread the handwriting. Thank heavens for the multiple search criteria you can use on Ancestry.com. Sometimes a search for "Oscar born in Tennessee within 5 years of 1867" will pull up the missing person in a place you'd never expect, with a last name garbled beyond recognition.
My grandmother and great-aunts hunted for people when census records were only accessible on microfilm reels. They sat in darkened rooms, squinting at screens, hoping to find the family they wanted. It was so much easier when the families stayed put. But of course, this is America, and they didn't. I have notes in my Aunt Margaret's chicken-scratch handwriting (she had terrible arthritis) where she wrote down every McClelland family she found in the 1850 Ohio census. I often wonder how many hours it took her to find them all.
When children vanish, it's usually because they died. These children are special to me, as they were to their parents. I like to learn all I can about these youngsters, bringing them back to memory as the ancient If they are young, and the family had a bit of money, they can often be found in the family graveyard as many county historical and genealogical stories have transcribed cemetery listings and put them online.
Today I found Lottie Louise Rutledge, youngest child of John D. Rutledge and Martha May Wiseman. She was only 3 when she died. Her father's tombstone has no dates on it in the Bethany Christian Church Cemetery in Collierville, Tennessee. But Lottie Louise has a beautiful granite grave marker:
Lottie Louise
Daughter of J.D. and M. M.
Rutledge
Born June 6, 1908
Died June 10, 1911
Their grave markers were among those we photographed in 1991, but until this afternoon I did not know how they fit in to our family tree.
It saddens me to think of the grief her mother felt, and the grief of J---'s great-grandfather and mother for their infant son, who lived only three days and has his own marker in the same cemetery as Lottie. That brings them back to life again, if only for a little while.
Everyone loves unusual deaths and family genealogists are no exception. On my side of the family I am particularly enamored of the McClelland murders that made the newspapers all over the US, and the distant relative of my Dad's family, a young man from a made-themselves-rich family who ate lunch with his mother and sisters, then quietly went into the family barn and blew out his brains with a shotgun. That made all the papers in Quincy, Illinois.
Today I found the tragic story of John Clinton Rutledge, a young man variously noted in census records as Clinton or John C. He was little Lottie Louise's brother and lived with his mother on the family farm in Collierville, Tennessee.