Hunting History - Finding Family

I once asked Nona if we had any mobsters in our family. I was young, and all I knew about Italians where what I saw in the movies, and I was all about the 20's.  Mobsters were cool.  We lived in the Midwest, Al Capone had his hands all over our state, even in our little part of it.  We had the "Moo-tel" and the Coliseum.  We had rum runner tunnels under the town streets.  I would have loved to have a member of the family be a member of a family. She told me that she was told that "Uncle Tony" wasn't necessarily a mob member, but that she'd heard quite the story about him.  Tony lived in Detroit, and the story I was told was that there was a parade, and Tony reached out an touched an American flag and was shot for it by an officer or a guard of some kind.  Cousin Louis Barra (fellow researcher) remarked that Tony was a "very fancy dresser" and a "strong member of the Italian-American society" in Detroit.  Truth? We didn't know.  ...

I'm going to start this one off a little different, because it's starts in the present, instead of the past.  Last week or so, in this very small world of ours, I, hailing from Central Illinois and only recently moving to Sarasota Florida, met a young woman about my age who's last name is Weller; my mom's maiden name and the most extensive branch on my family tree.  We got to talking, and her family is from Maryland, one of the first places 'we' settled.  Eventually she and I will connect not just with each other, but also the dots from her lineage to mine.  But that's later.  I said, "Did you know there's a Weller pottery? It was pretty famous." She replied with, "Did you know there's Weller whiskey?"  I did, in fact.  I also know it's founder is my second cousin six times removed (although I can't tell you what that means.)  I told my mom (the official Weller, haha) and she wanted a picture with said whiskey.  Picture,...

This post will go hand in hand with my last, 'Louis Barra in Saipan.'  I concentrated more on Lousi himself on that one, but this is my search to find the owner of the other photo, of a Phillip Rey.  I know only a few things; he woud have been in the same Army unit as Louis (my cousin) and Jerry Olivera's (owner of the photo) dad.  On the photo Mr Olivera scrawled Phillip Rey - KY Killed in (?)  We assumed he was killed in Saipan, but his name isn't on any of the records of KIA there, nor could Mr Olivera find his name on the Wall. I've taken to facebook for help searching, and today I'm doing some digging.  Just on the offchance I find something, this will kind of just chronicle the methods I use. I started with a search on the WWII KIA/WIA list and found nothing under army. I went to ancestry.com and searched, finding a Phillip Ray on a 1940 census, living in Detroit but being born in Kentucky 1922, in his Freshman year in high school living with parents Ga...