"Remoted" Day 241 (Thursday)

It was a vacation day that turned into a full day on the computer chasing my tail. The rabbit hole is endless. This was not how I intended to spend the day, but in the absence of any solid plans, it is how the day turned out. 

I am trying to figure out where Oscar Waino Kask (also spelled Oskar Waina Kask, and Oscar Väinö Kask) was hiding from 1926 until 1942 and how he managed to avoid the US Federal Census of 1930 and 1940, and Fitchburg City Directory during that time span. After appearing on numerous passenger lists arriving in the US and Canada with and without wife and kids in tow in the range of 1910 -1918, the US Federal Census in 1920, a small news item in 1925 and a front page newspaper story in 1926, he seems to have vanished. He is not seen in any records found until the 1942 Draft Registration for World War II which has him still living in Fitchburg and working at Iver Johnson Arms and Cycle Works. There have been plenty of times I wished I could just disappear, but this guy seems to have pulled it off for 16 years.

Later, while checking my email, there was a message from Geni, a genealogy group that several of my cousins on my Dad’s side are on. I’ve been receiving emails with update notices from Geni for years, but never really pay attention to them. Yesterday I went into Geni and did a search on great grandpa Oscar’s name, even though I haven’t built any info on that side of the family, then promptly forgot about it.

Today’s email caught my attention with the subject line “We found your in-law connection to Oskar Väinö Kask.” I thought, that’s cool, because I’ve been looking for him all day. My search included multiple data sites with every phonetic variation of the name I could think of and scrolling the census lists looking for the street name referenced in the 1926 news story and on the 1942 Draft Registration card. I finally concluded when the house doesn’t have a number, is referenced in a news item as “a three-room shack,” and part of the address on the Draft Registration is “near the Proctor Farm,” maybe it isn’t somewhere the census takers ventured to. Upon opening the message, it read:

Did a comedian write this? 

The text looks like some comedian threw every possible family connection into a sentence for a laugh. And it worked, because I did laugh. When I opened the link I saw that is the actual connection on Dad’s side. 

There is a much more direct connection, though. Oscar is Mom’s grandfather. And evidently, he is also a connection on Dad’s side. Now I want to know how many other crossovers exist in the tree. But possibly not as much as I want to know what great grandpa Oscar was up to from 1926 until 1942 when he was dodging all the official recordkeeping.