Finding the Old through the New, Tearing Down a Decades-old Brick wall (Part 1)

My great-grandfather, Beryl G. “B. G.” Dean, descended from a family of terrible record keepers. My mother tackled researching his family for 30 years, before turning it over to me back in 2010. From that year on, I became the official researcher for the Dean line. 

         I literally started from scratch, having only a collection of old family letters to work with. Working from B. G., I found his father and brothers, then eventually his grandfather and grandmother on his father’s side. The true brick wall was the objectives of finding the name of Henry’s father and identifying Mariah’s maiden name. Mariah and Henry’s unknown father became a research stop around 2012, when New FamilySearch was the LDS Church’s genealogy site. 

         No matter how long and hard I searched, I could not find Mariah’s maiden name, Henry’s father, or other family members related to Henry C. Dean. That is until 2020. The tools for bursting down this brick wall proved to be a set of skills that required methodical dismantling, rather than a good old dynamite blast.