Innis Family Tree
I was leaving my Colorado research for awhile when I went back and read through the COGenBlog that I mentioned in one of my previous posts. That blog reminded me that I needed to search the Colorado State Archives and I eventually wound up at the Colorado Historical Records Index. There are divorce cases posted for Colorado from the 1870s to 1939 from a variety of counties. I selected Start Your Search, typed in the name Gattis and selected Court as the record type. Just for giggles I tried divorce and got no results, but under Court there were four entries for divorce action – one for Lula C. Gattis, and three for Oscar C. Gattis all from 1921. You may select the records and inquire for the fees, but I’m not going to be requesting any records. Even with the wrong middle initials, I am fairly comfortable that these are my folks.
Well I think between this and the possible death dates found on familysearch my earlier theory that Oscar has died by 1920 should be set aside – it’s hard to be a party in a divorce action if you’re dead! So Lula’s use of the title widow was not accurate as applied to her Gattis surname. Hhhhhmmmmmm!
I tried all the other categories, but had no other hits for either the Gattis or Innis name. The search will pull up anything close in spelling – when I searched for Innis it pulled up Ninnis, Dennis, and McMinnis so exact searches may not be required.
Sadly, I found little online in Colorado that resulted in concrete sources. Even Ancestry’s huge records collection seems limited in this state. The only items on Ancestry specific to Colorado are the 1885 Colorado State Census, the rather limited Colorado Marriages from 1859-1900, and the newspapers are limited in area. When you go to the old search and pull up the records by state, with the exception of the items mentioned, they appear to be all national or general records. There simply are not enough state or county records to do you much good. Considering that Denver was a major city on several migration routes it’s a pretty poor compilation of records.