Same Name
A Brush with Peter the Painter
By Myra Vanderpool Gormley ©2018
As every genealogist knows or quickly finds out, family tree research often leads to finding people with the same name and then the hard work is figuring out which one is “ours.” One simply cannot use a name — even an unusual one — as a lone identifier.
Sometimes we encounter people of the same name of the same generation who also were born, married, and/or died in the same or nearby localities. Another challenge is when our ancestors married spouses with the same or similar given names. For an example, see my blog “Husband Breaks Rule No. 8.”
Those with common surnames probably don’t think about how other Smiths, Johnsons, Williamses, Browns, or Joneses might be related to them, but those of us with less common surnames often do — simply because we assume there is a possibility there is a family connection, somewhere. My father was an only son with only one paternal uncle and no male first cousins. He was always interested in knowing if he had other Vanderpool relatives — somewhere.
A rather unscientific search based on information from the 2000 U.S. census pertaining to surnames reveals that Vanderpool ranks No. 5126 in terms of the most common surnames in America for that year. This means out of a sample of 100,000 people in the United States, our surname would occur an average of 2.33 times. As a comparison, using the same base, No. 1 Smith would occur 880.85 times. These government-compiled statistics do not take into account the several variant spellings of Vanderpool, such as Vanderpoel, Vanderpol, Vanderpole and Pool; rather it separates them. Genealogists can’t rely on any particular spellings of surnames to identify relationships, but long before computers and the Internet came along, my father assumed anyone with our surname must be related.
When we lived in western Kansas in the mid-1950s, there was a Peter H. Vanderpool who lived there also. He was a house painter. There were only two Vanderpool families in Garden City.
My dad, who was an auto mechanic, often received telephone calls from people looking for Peter the Painter, and of course, Peter received calls for John the Mechanic. Dad and Peter tried to figure how they were related, but they never did.
Periodically, through the years, I would search to learn whatever happened to Peter the Painter (as I always thought of him), but I had scant personal information about him. In fact, I did not know his age, or his wife’s name, and I didn’t recall them having any children. Anyway, almost by accident and thanks to a cousin’s work for Find-A-Grave, I found enough information on this Peter H. Vanderpool to determine that he was a son of Erastus Fillmore Vanderpool who was born ca 1868 in Mercer County, Missouri and married a Sarah Estelle Linville.
After 60-some years I finally solved a genealogical mystery that intrigued my dad. He and Peter the Painter were 4C1R.
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