Lessons Learned from My Father's Cars

Before his death in 2004 my father and I went through a number of his photos and wrote the information about them on the back. He told me the years for the cars in his photos.

In December I wrote about the early cars registered in Oregon to many of my family members as found in the Ancestry.com Data Base: Oregon, Motor Vehicle Registration, 1911-1946. So I searched that database for my father, Lester Albertson, and got 7 hits.

So I checked each one:

• 1930-31, Ford 1/21
• 1930-31, Ford 28 sdn
• 1931-32, Ford 25 tk
• 1932-33, Ford 28 sdn
• 1932-33, Ford 25 tk
• 1946, Ford 40 pickup
• 1946, Chev 35 truck

The 1928 Ford photo also had a notation of 1931 written on the back, so I believe he bought it in 1931, replacing the 1921 Ford shown in the data base. But, what about the cars from the later 1930's? Why didn't they show in the data base?

So I did what I should have done earlier, investigate the data base more carefully. I used the browse function and discovered that it included data for each year from 1911 to 1929, then had the split years 1930-31, 1931-32, 1932-33, but then skipped to 1942 and then to 1946. All the years were not included.

So I have learned two lessons:

1. Don't assume a data base which names beginning and ending years includes all the years in between.
2. Take time to visit with the older generation and get those photos identified while you can.