I had spent the previous four months searching the web, imposing on kind friends to do lookups, and scanning microfilm copies of censuses, all in vain. I was disappointed but not surprised. Not even his children knew much about my grandfather, Charles Creed Harris. After his first wife died, Charlie had to put my five-year-old father and his four siblings into foster homes scattered around Patrick County, Virginia. They seldom saw him afterward, because Charlie Harris was a carpenter and moved to where the work was. Charlie later married again and moved away. No one could tell me anything about who his parents were. All I had to go on was his name, the dates on his grave stone (1879 - 1929), and the fact that he had ties to Patrick County, Virginia, where his body was returned for burial beside his first wife, Ada A. Wood. I could find no record of him in the censuses for Patrick or any of the neighboring counties. Eventually I met through RootsWeb a kind volunteer who managed to find two records for Charlie Harris, but they raised as many questions as they answered. The first record was of his birth in 1878 (not 1879). It listed his mother as Elizabeth Harris and the father as "unknown," presumably meaning unknown to the person reporting the birth. The second record was of his marriage to his first wife, and it listed his mother as Nancy A. Harris. Instead of the father's name, the word "blank" was entered. Had Elizabeth Harris changed her name to Nancy A. Harris? And why was the father not listed in either of the documents? I shifted my focus to Elizabeth and Nancy A. Harris. There were several Elizabeth Harris's in the records, but only one, listed as age 7 in the 1860 Patrick County census, would have been the right age to have been Charlie's mother. This Elizabeth was not listed with the family in the 1870 census, but a Nancy A. Harris, age 4, was. This Nancy A. Harris also turned up as the second wife of the father of Ada A. Wood, Charlie's first wife! A coincidence? Was this Elizabeth the mother of Charlie Harris? Could she have died or left the area before 1870, leaving Charlie in the care of her young sister Nancy? Could Charlie have met Ada when Nancy was marrying Ada's father? But if Charlie was the son of Elizabeth Harris, why did he have her surname and not that of his father or a step father? I began to suspect that my grandfather Charles had been born out of wedlock to the 25-year-old Elizabeth, but was reluctant to make such a claim without further evidence. I had just about given up hope of finding such evidence when one day I was mailing a copy of an entry from the 1900 Patrick County census to a distant cousin on my mother's side of the family. Total strangers had been so helpful to me in my own search that I thought this favor to someone I had never met would be a small return on the debt. As I was putting the copy into the envelope, something on the page caught my eye: ------Harris, Nancy A. Servant Oct 1864 35 S(ingle) House Keeper She was listed in the household of the man she kept house for, and I had missed the entry before by searching only surnames of heads of families. Beneath the name of Nancy A. Harris were those of her two children listed as "inmates," evidently born out of wedlock, since Nancy A. was listed as single, rather than divorced or widowed. And finally, beneath these two children, was the following: ------Charley C. Hireling June 1879 20 Farm laborer The fact that he was listed differently from Nancy's children suggested that he was not one of them by birth. So Charlie Creed Harris had indeed been raised by his aunt, Nancy A. Harris. After this discovery I went to visit my grandparents' graves in Stuart, Virginia. I had been there many times before and remembered the graves as being off by themselves in a remote corner of a graveyard. But this time I noticed that there were not two, but three graves in the corner. On one side of Ada's simple slab was Charlie's, and on the other side was a tombstone I had previously ignored. It read: Nancy A. Wood born Oct 8 1864 died July 22 1909 She was a fond and affectionate wife/ A fond mother and friend to all.