A Fortunate Discovery

Sometimes, despite our intent to be methodical, we jump ahead of ourselves. So it was with my search for the parentage of the Faller children. While researching marriages recorded in association with another Rote, I made use of the New Castle Public Library's Marriage/Obituary Database, and in the process I found Mabel Rote's marriage to a Faller. This library database, which is basically an index to individuals named as principles in marriage and obituary announcements, has proven to be invaluable for researching marriages and obituaries for individuals with connections to New Castle and Lawrence County.

The record for Mabel returns this information:

id	Last Name	First Name	Spouse	Parent	Newspaper	Page	Date of Marriage Announcement
327878	Rote	Mabel	Jenry J. Faller		NCN	3	05-14-1912

While the name of the spouse, "Jenry J. Faller" isn't quite what we're looking for, it seems likely to be a transcription error.

Having found the record for Mabel Rote and a Faller, I ran a search for Faller and the year 1912, ignoring the unusual first name for the time being. Here's what I got:

id	Last Name	First Name	Spouse	Parent	Newspaper	Page	Date of Marriage Announcement
309934	Faller	Henry J	Mabel Rote		NCN	3	5-14-1912

Ahah! As I suspected. We now have information tying Mabel Rote to Henry J. Faller, with a marriage announcement date of May 14, 1912. With this information in hand, it was time to see if I could find the actual text of the announcement in the New Castle News. For this, I returned to Ancestry.com, which I know from frequent encounters has records from this newspaper. To get to the records for New Castle News, I start with the Card Catalog.

To access the Card Catalog on Ancestry.com, click Search, then Card Catalog.

To access a specific set of records, type the name of the desired resource  in the  Title box.

Note

You don't have to know the name of the resource. For example, if you want marriage records from North Dakota sources, you might put "North Dakota" in the Title box (hoping that ND newspapers and other record collections included the state name in the title), and "marriage" in the Keyword(s) box.

My search for New Castle News had the following result:

A match for New Castle News.

Clicking the link for New Castle News presents me with a couple of options for searching the newspaper. The first is a search form, while the second is a browse option that allows me to select a specific date. I chose to use the advanced version of the search form. (My default on Ancestry.com is to use advanced search forms, as I prefer the enhanced accuracy such forms provide.)

Search form for New Castle News. Mabel Rote has been entered in the name fields, as has the publication year.

Searching for Mabel Rote and the year of publication results in a number of hits, with those in 1912 at the top of the list. The first is for March 8, 1912 and turns out to be unrelated to the marriage (although of interest in learning a bit more about Mable Rote), and the second is for Tuesday, May 14, 1912 and is for the Society page, on which the marriage announcement can be found under the heading "Quiet Marriage."

"Quiet Wedding" for Mabel Rote and Henry J. Faller, both of New Castle, Pennsylvania.

Transcription

Quiet Wedding

Friends of Miss Mabel Rote, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A. M. Rote of Patterson avenue, and Mr. Henry J. Faller of Fern avenue, will be interested to learn of their marriage which was a quiet even of Monday evening at 7 o'clock in the home of Rev. J. M. Farrell on Carson street. The bride was prettily attired and the witnesses were his sister Miss Emma Rote, and Miss Mary Jenkins. The young couple will go to house-keeping on the Westside.

Aside from the claim that Miss Emma Rote was Faller's sister (most likely an error, as Mabel had a sister named Emma), the announcement is quite informative, confirming as it does that this Mabel Rote is the child of A. M. Rote (almost certainly Alpheus McClelland Rote), the addresses of the respective parties, the name of the minister who officiated over the marriage, and the names of the two witnesses.

While the evidence I've found, as reported in this and previous posts, is not comprehensive proof that Mable Rote and Henry J. Faller are the parents of Henry John and Ella L. Faller, at this point I'm fairly confident that this is, in fact, the case. While I will, of course, continue to collect any documents I find on the members of this family, at this point I consider that particular mystery solved. Perhaps the one less than satisfactory aspect of this is the question of what happened to the parents of these children, that resulted in their living with their grandparents.

ETA: Another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place since I first posted this. Mabel died in 1919. Although I have not yet found a direct record of her death, I found a notice of her burial on January 10, 1919, published in the January 13, 1919 edition of New Castle News. This goes a long way toward explaining why the children were living with their grandparents, although it does not completely explain why their father chose or was unable to care for them.