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Hi Linda:
Are you user ID "northernrustic" at Ancestry.com also researching this family? If not... the following may help. (I've emailed you a message with his / her email address).
Locating living people is a sensitive area in my opinion because of issues of privacy -- so I am careful not to disclose names / places online. Yet, I know how important it might be to some people to find photographs of themselves / ancestors that they have never seen before.
So, respecting this, I have tried and have been successful in finding distant cousins. My main focus has been to research my ggg-grandparents Benjamin & Lovisa (Rice) Sheldon of NY > OH, and to fill out the genealogies of their 7 children. One died in infancy and another did not have any children, and then I have found and met distant cousins of the remaining 5 including from my direct line.
It will take a little effort, cleverness, and patience, and a lot of persistence on your part, but it is possible. These are some of the things I have done:
(a) Post as detailed of a message as you can in bulliten boards / surname registries as you can, as you did here at GenForum. I have placed our Johnson / Williams / Sheldon connection in each of the three surname forums and also at the Eaton County, Michigan, forum. From a message I left almost 2 years ago I received a response from a cousin of our Williams connection, and have talked to our Williams cousin and she had photographs of my grandfather as a child, and a cabinet card photograph of my gg-grandparents with their two children Frank and Stella Sheldon from the late 1800's (thanks Wendy!).
So your messages here in the Sheldon forum are important, but also try leaving them in the counties where they originated and then where they eventually moved to in California.
(b) Follow their names in local newspapers if you can. An Ancestry.com subscription will also bring with it the ability to search scanned newspapers. Lorain County, Ohio papers were some of the first to be scanned and I have found articles and notations about our Sheldon family who passed through this county in the mid-1850's to current times. If it wasn't for that, I would not have been able to find out that a Benjamin Woodmansee had moved to Gratiot County, Michigan, where he died, because his parents Bradly and Sylvina (Sheldon) Woodmansee had to travel by train to see him in his last days (1893). I have since seen his headstone in North Star Cemetery, Gratiot County, and have also seen the hand-written notation of his death in county records... where his parents are also noted.
(c) you may try to obtain a copy of the death record because you may be able to find a reference to a living family member (i.e. an "informant") or something along that line. You might try to find his obituary by contacting the local genealogical society or library or by leaving a query at the Los Angeles county forum here on GenForum. Obituaries might give you Phoebe's married name and location, for example.
(d) you can find the Social Security Death Index free at "Findagrave.com" and at the right hand side there is a link to the SSDI. Follow these names there... that's how I found his SSDI notation.
(e) The phone book reference I gave you is of great help, and was the first step for me to actually talk to extended family and distant living cousins. I have met and talked to several by this method. So you might try to contact the Sheldon that I mentioned in my first response. (I noted... "Go to dogpile.com and by the search window, select "white pages" and then type in Ray Sheldon (no city) and then IN for the state. That's one of the ways that I use to find distant living relatives." ... because there is a Ray Sheldon listing, hint).
(f) If you have a difficult time searching for his children, then other cousins might know of his whereabouts. Fred had siblings Evelyn (m. Albert Robinson), Charles, Ralph, Ruby (m. unknown), Amanda (m. Clarence Anderson), and May (m. unkown). Hamlet, Indiana is also mentioned as a b. place. Some of the children of these siblings could also still be living.
(g) another resource is www.usgenweb.net - go to IN and then the county and then see if you can search "Sheldon" and you might find luck locating distant cousins.
I hope the above helps.
Jack
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