Newspapers Can Find Relatives You Didn’t Know You Had

I think I’ve discovered two relatives I never knew existed – in the city where I grew up!

I’ve been doing Genealogy for a long time and thought I had “met” them all at one point or another, and then I came across this old newspaper article.

In May of 1929, employees from the Yale & Towne Manufacturing company came together to put on a production of the play “Arnold Goes into Business.”

Look closer at this enlargement of the main cast.

Who are these guys: John and Mrs. Marie Anna Kemp?
Mrs. Marie Anna Kemp plays the part of Irma’s mother, Catherine Gleason,
and
John Kemp plays the part of Irma’s father H. A. Cooper.

Now if this surname was Smith or Brown, I wouldn’t have noticed it – but Kemp is a fairly unusual name. I like to research all Kemp ancestral lines to run them back a few generations to see if we are related or not.

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If these are my relatives, I have never heard of them. I asked my 91-year-old father if he had any idea who they were, and he had never heard of them either.

According to the old news article: “Every member of the cast…is a Yale & Towne employee.” That tells me they must live in or near Stamford.

My grandfather, Willard H. Kemp, did work for Y&T and his father was John Henry Kemp – but in 1929 he was 63 years old and was employed full-time in the Post Office. He didn’t retire until 1931 when he was 65 years old, and he never worked for Y&T. So this John Kemp could be him – but he doesn’t match the other clues given in the article or the other facts in his personal history.

So – who were John Kemp and “Mrs. Marie Anna Kemp”?

I looked in the 1920 and the 1930 census – no mention of any other John or Marie Anna Kemp living anywhere in the state of Connecticut.

So – just when I thought I’d tracked them all down, here is a newspaper article alerting me to two more possible relatives in our Kemp family tree.

I’ll have to dig deeper into GenealogyBank’s archive of 1.7 billion records to find out more about them. And it’s the same for you: you have ancestors that are waiting to be discovered. Sign up today and begin your search!

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