I found a plat book from Antwerp Township, Michigan in 1930. It was one of those moments when the world just seems still and your heart races and you just know that it’s all going to come together…. Only, It didn’t.

My Great-Grandparent’s names weren’t listed anywhere on the map, and as many hours, yes hours and hours that I have spent eyeing every square inch of that map, it didn’t change, they weren’t listed.

….That was over a year ago.

My Great-Grandparents were Hungarian immigrants that arrived in the early 1900’s. They met in Pennsylvania, married and started their family before settling down in Northwest Indiana, where the next 4 generations of my family would be born. I didn’t know much about this side of my family other than this, but something was calling me to learn more. So I started with what I knew and worked my way out. I found passenger records, their marriage-certificate that listed where the groom worked and lived. I found the address to their apartment in Philadelphia, and I tacked down the year that they must have realized that the steel mills in Indiana were going to be more lucrative. I had mapped out their whole story… I made a timeline, and thought I had it all figured out. From 1907-1980… I. KNEW. IT. ALL.

That was until I posted my proud blog post about their beginnings “Martin and Margaret Hevezi-The Beginning. One of my older family members read the post and messaged me that I was missing something. “They owned an Vineyard in Michigan”. Huh? They owned and lived on a piece of land in southwest Michigan sometime in the late 20’s to early 30’s.  I would have completely missed this information if it weren’t for the tip and one US Census that put them in Antwerp County in 1930. Those were the only two pieces of information I had to go on.

So I started to dissect the census. Surely there had to be some sort of clue there. The only thing it told me was that they were “fruit farmers” and they owned the land they were living on. But, what were they doing there? Where was the land? Why did they leave?

And that’s when I found the plot maps. 1930. It was perfection. I spent a full 8 hour day staring at that plot map, I spent another 8 hour day comparing the names on the census to the names on the map to try to narrow down the area that the farm had to be.

I called the library in Paw Paw Michigan, I called the courthouse, I called the land records office. I’ve reached out to local vineyard owners, I’ve questioned every family member until they were sick of me. I dug through documents, skimmed old letters and searched for clues in old photographs. There is nothing else to go on.

It’s been over a year now since I started trying to figure out my family’s time in Michigan, and since then, I keep getting the same results. Nothing. I’ve pulled up the plot map and census about 100 times since then, driving my self insane, thinking maybe i just missed something, maybe something will pop out at me. So far, I still have nothing to go on.

So what do you do? When do you stop and accept the fact that you may never know? How many months, years do you spend researching, and staring at the same land records over and over again, hoping that you just missed it, that it will magically appear.  How long do you spend before you give up and accept it? When do you accept the heartbreak that you will probably never know the full story?

Leave your comments below!