Family History Writing Challenge Day 10

In 2015 I traveled to Salt Lake City with a small group of genealogists for a week of research at the Holy Grail of genealogy, the Family History Library. The world’s largest genealogical library is the undertaking of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Open to the general public at no charge, the library holds genealogical records from over 110 countries and territories, and its collection includes over 2 million rolls of microfilmed records onsite. Additionally there are hundreds of thousands of microfiche, books, periodicals and electronic resources at the library. Volunteers at the library are available to help with your search.

My main focus for the visit was Thompson Hightower, with the goal being to find a link between him and George Hightower, Jr. At the time of my visit microfilms at the library were available for circulation, meaning I could have a copy shipped to a local LDS Family History Center. I decided to focus on items that were not available for circulation but instead could only be viewed at the library in Salt Lake City. (The microfilm policy changed in September of 2017, and they are no longer shipping microfilms as their goal is to have all their films digitized and available online by the end of 2020. To date, 1.5 of the 2.4 million rolls of microfilm have been digitized.)

The library had a good selection of books from Campbell and Kenton counties in Kentucky, so I spend a lot of time pulling them from the shelves and searching for any reference to Hightowers. The only thing that I found after all of my hunting was a listing for Thompson in the Linden Grove Cemetery book of interments. That was helpful because it gave me a month and year that Thompson died. Before this all I knew is that he appeared the 1866 Covington City Directory, but I found no evidence of him in directories or census records after that. The interment book further indicated that his daughter Marjorie had died in 1865, and that he was buried in the same plot as her.

Linden Grove Cemetery interments

It was time to sit down with one of the volunteers at the library to seek help. Before it was all said and done, several volunteers weighed in on my brick wall, and the only thing any of them came up with on Thompson Hightower was the Find A Grave memorial. I had come full circle.