Q: Mommy, Mommy! I don’t want to go to China!

A: Shut up, and keep digging.

That’s how I feel researching my family history sometimes. I keep digging and digging, and the hole gets bigger and bigger, but I never seem to arrive.

Case in point: my great-great grandfather, William Thomas. I’ve been searching for his death certificate for twenty years. It doesn’t help that both of his names are very common, but even so … twenty years? It’s in the 20th century, for heaven’s sake!

But I am a bulldog, and once I get a hold of a bone, I keep digging at it.

Yesterday, I found it. William H. Thomas. Born 15 March 1848 at Stinson, Carter County, Kentucky. Died 16 September 1927 at Marytown, McDowell County, West Virginia.

He was not in the state where I expected him (Kentucky). Nor was he in the county in West Virginia (Logan) where I have looked for him.

He lived much longer than I thought, so my searches were futile back in the day when you had to specify a span of predetermined years.

He’s listed only by his initials, so he didn’t come up when I initially searched the West Virginia database. In fact, they’ve got his middle initial wrong, so even if I had searched for his initials, he would not have come up.

His wife wasn’t much easier. Her name is Sarah Thomas — equally common. But at least with Sarah, I had an idea when she died (the 1940s or 1950s — 1954, as it turned out). And I knew the family had moved to West Virginia by then.

When I realized through census work that many of their children lived from 1910 through 1930 in the county where Sarah died, I went back to the West Virginia database and searched just that county for every person with the last name Thomas. Then I ground through hundreds of death certificates. In the early years, I found several I didn’t know about — mostly infants that died between censuses, but about halfway through it got tedious. I almost bailed, certain there was nothing more to find.

I did mention I’m a bulldog, right? I never let go of a bone, and this might have been a tiny, dry bone, but it was still a bone. I kept digging, and it paid off.

But I’m going to take the lesson in the photo above: if you have to dig to China, rent a backhoe. Anybody who’s ever searched for death certificates by sending $4 to a Vital Records department to have them search a span of two years recognizes things like the WV database and Ancestry.com for what they are: very powerful tools to help you dig.

This was probably taken when he enlisted. He still has a boyish enthusiasm that is gone by the time the photo I posted last time was taken. According to family legend, Vernard was captured during WWII on an island, and got malaria. When he came home, he was not the same and was put on disability. This is a photo Vernard’s daughter sent me.

This is Vernard (on left), his mother Cora (nee Thomas Perkins Bailey) George, and his younger brother (still living).

Vernard’s daughter sent this photo to me, and she believed it to be Vernard and the still living younger half-brother in the photo above. But I don’t think it’s that brother. Vernard had another, younger brother who was named James.

James W. Bailey was born 27 July 1925 in West Virginia and died 10 July 1931 of encephalitis in Logan, West Virginia. He is buried at Yuma Cemetery, the same rundown cemetery where his mother Cora is buried, and his stepfather, Sam George (though I’m sure he doesn’t have a stone).

What do you think? Is this Vernard and James, full brothers three years apart? Or Vernard and his half-brother, six years younger than he is? If this is James, this may be the only photo of him that exists.

My father’s uncle, Vernard Bailey (the one in the WWII uniform) came home from the war with PTSD (though they didn’t call it that, of course). He was on disability, and though he didn’t live there, he had his checks sent to his mother’s house. One month, probably in the early 1950s, he picked up his check and … disappeared.

No one heard from him again, and most people assumed he had been killed, perhaps in some brawl. For twenty years, I’ve looked for information about him without any luck (it didn’t help that I didn’t even know his birthday).

Then earlier this month, I got an email from his daughter. She knew no more than I did about his death because her parents split up before he disappeared, and no one on her side of the family kept in touch with his family.

Yesterday she sent me an email. Vernard Bailey was born 17 April 1921 in Floyd County, Kentucky, and died 7 December 1980 in Alachua County, Florida. He is buried at Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola, Florida. He left a widow and four children.

Sad that he felt the need to break off all contact with his siblings and mother, but it was comforting to hear that he had a long and completely life after all.