The organizers of the William Boucher reunion are starting with incomplete information about the family, as often happens. My cousins Cheryl and Connie and I all have lists of William Boucher’s descendants, but of course these lists are more accurate about Boucher’s children – Willy, Sophia, Freddie, Oscar, Frank, Imogene, Pauline, Victor, Josephine, Willy, Josephine, Gertrude, Louis, Frances, Marie, Pauline, Ernest, Carlos, Florence, Emile, Constance, and (yes) Emile and Constance – than about modern-day descendants. How best to find today’s Boucher family?

Well, this blog is one answer. A handful of the readers of this and other posts about the Bouchers and the banjo show at the Baltimore Museum of Industry will know modern-day members of the family, and, with luck, they will mention it to some of our cousins.

Another route – one that I have used with my last three books – is a Facebook page. For my books on the Lowells (with Chris Child), the Saltonstalls, and the Winthrops (forthcoming in 2015), I’ve set up a page serving as a virtual post office for family members. Now, for this project, I have created a Boucher Family Reunion 2014 community page and invited my fellow reunion organizers to join it. In time, it is my hope that their networks – and their friends’ networks – on Facebook will bring Boucher cousins into the community.

In the meantime, we will be seeking out Boucher cousins via Google, Bing, and other search engines, using the public records of births, deaths, and (especially) marriages to identify the descendants of William Esprit Boucher, Jr., and his two wives. What, for example, should we make of the family of William Boucher’s second son by his second marriage, Louis Albert Boucher (1871–?1914)?

Louis married Blanche Viers Cumming of Baltimore in 1895, and they were divorced in 1900. Their only son, William Viers Cumming Boucher (b. 1896), was listed as William V. C. Boucher in the 1900 Census; by 1910, he was living in Philadelphia in the household of Frank and Blanch Reed [sic] as Gordon Cumming Reed. (Cousin Gordon died in 1962.) According to a trust document benefiting the heirs of Aunt Florence Boucher (1879–1972), Gordon died without issue, but in the 1940 Census he was married to Mary C. Reed and living in Beverly, Burlington County, New Jersey. Did he, in fact, have any children with Cousin Mary? Perhaps someone out there knows…!

The series continues here.