Someone asked me how I could have identified “Doma” from the clippings I had from the newspapers. Here’s how I found her – maybe it will suggest tips for identifying people you find mentioned in an ancestor’s diary or other historical documents.

I started with what Grant sent me: the clipping where she analyzed the signatures of the two members of the First Presidency, and the classified ad from the Manti Messenger. They gave no personal details, unless the mailing address in Pueblo, Colorado was a clue.

First I Googled doma handwriting analysis and a few variants (character analysis, for example). There were plenty of hits, but most of those hits didn’t include the key term, doma. So I forced Google to include it in every search by using quotation marks: “doma” character analysis. Most of the hits were OCR errors, where some longer word included letters that more or less looked like doma.

There were, however, three or four hits that came from Newspapers.com, a terrific newspaper database that I find so frequently useful that I have paid the subscription fee for several years. Searching there with the same search terms I had used for Google turned up quite a few examples of Doma’s handwriting analysis columns. Although they didn’t contain reliable personal information – they did claim all sorts of university degrees for Doma, but no names of those universities, and nothing I could verify or build a new search around – I collected all those articles, just in case. It’s the same with tracing an ancestor in the census: you look for him in every census, even when you don’t expect to find anything new. If you skip a census, fate will decree that that census is the one that named your ancestor’s visiting mother, providing the clue that would have opened up your whole line, and you missed it.

A few – not many – of those multiple articles ended with the useful line: Copyright by Dorothy Y. Durland. I didn’t know what connection Doma had to Dorothy Y. Durland, but it was at least a name I could research. So I searched for her by Google, in FamilySearch, and at Ancestry.com, running searches with and without the middle initial, and with Durland understood to be a maiden name, and then a married name (you can search genealogical databases like FamilySearch and Ancestry for anybody named “Dorothy” who was married to anybody named “Durland”).

I found several possibilities, including women with various middle initials. Nothing pointed to any one of them as our lady … until I noticed that one of them had ties to Pueblo, Colorado (remember that Manti Messenger advertisement?). One of the submissions, for Dorothy Mae Y. McPherson Durland, included significantly more sources than any other listing, so I started there, examining each linked source. No photographs, unfortunately, so I couldn’t compare the one I had found to anyone – but I already suspected that I shouldn’t rely on the photo as being a real picture of our lady; it could so easily have been a model who looked like a newspaper’s idea of an attractive young handwriting analyst that the public would trust to tell them who they should marry.

I examined a great many of the linked sources. There was a longstanding Pueblo connection, but that hardly seemed enough to seal the deal.

Then I reached the 1940 census, and there was the indication that I thought was strong enough to base an identification on: This Dorothy had reported being a “feature writer” in the “daily newspaper” industry. The name, the location, the occupation all fit, and she wasn’t too young or too old to be active during the time I needed to find her. This was her, to a reasonable degree of likelihood.

I re-searched the databases, adding the names and dates and places included in the Ancestry.com listing, hoping to find an obituary or other biographical statement that would make the identification rock solid, but didn’t find anything in the time I had to give to the search (it is just a jokey blog post, after all, and I’m supposed to have a day job), but I would keep searching if she were an ancestor or if I had some other ongoing interest in her. There is almost certainly more to be found.

So that’s my quick-and-dirty advice to identifying people in the family documents you might have: Start with Google, and check the standard genealogical databases (there are others besides those I used in this search). Search the newspapers – there are some that come with your Ancestry.com subscription even if you don’t subscribe to their full database at Newspapers.com; there’s DigitalNewspapers.com if your target was a Utahn, and other online databases maintained by other historical societies around the country and around the world. Look at every hit, even if it seems repetitive, because you can’t risk missing a critical clue (like the copyright line in Doma’s case, or the visiting mother in my census example). There are specialty databases, too, that you should use when they are applicable – like the Church’s new database of early missionaries, or the Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel database.

Whenever you find some additional detail – a fuller name, a place where the person might have lived – search all the same resources again using that additional detail. Be flexible in matters such as spelling of names. Be creative, especially in imagining how people might have made mistakes – if you’re looking for John Michael Carpenter, consider that some indexer might have thought “Carpenter” was an indication of occupation and indexed your man as “John Michael.” Or consider that John Michael Carpenter might not yet have anglicized his name from Johannes Michael Zimmerman. Especially when you’re searching for 20th century people, keep hunting – it is almost inconceivable that a 20th century person could have escaped all forms of personal documentation. He or she will be there somewhere.