Genealogists understand a brick wall. Usually, that refers to the inability to find the parents of an ancestor. For me, one of my ‘brick walls’, is a family story that I believe to be true but haven’t been able to document. Thus, my unknown.
When I first started researching the family, I would spend a summer weekend traveling six hours to Dodge City so I could spend some time with my grandmother. Even though we basically set around her apartment, read and talked, these weekends were precious to me. During one of those weekends, I wrote down her story about her childhood in a children’s home in Kansas City.
So far, I haven’t found a children’s home on Independence Road (actually Avenue), let alone records for such a home. However, I did find a Rev. Charles Litten in the 1913 Directory of Kansas City, Missouri.
According to the entry, Rev. Litten was the ‘sec and genl mgr Conserving Assn of America’ at 2610 Cleveland in Kansas City, Missouri. Further searching is required, but I feel like this directory entry is a major lead to finding verification that my grandmother lived in a children’s home.