Ruth Evelyn (Cooper) Hovencamp 1928–2003

Result: EXACTLY ONE: DIANA HOVENCAMP x ROBERT DOUGHERTY, Sep 1964, SUSSEX BOROUGH, certificate 34216 -> [C.169]. Six months before the dinner notice, in her mother's own borough. She is now Living; her husband Robert Dougherty. THE SWEEP SHAPE IS WHY IT WORKED: a given-name search was impossible - the catalog did not know her given name, which was the whole question - so the only usable instrument was the surname, read exhaustively. 34 rows is small enough to read, which is what made the surname-only recipe applicable here. WORTH KEEPING: Sussex Co. is thick with Hovencamps - the same 34 rows include June, Rodney, Wilbur, Gloria, Mary E, Mary A, Wayne, Dean, Alice and Wanda - so 'a Diana Hovencamp married a Dougherty' would NOT have been enough alone. The newspaper sentence is what tied that bride to this mother.

Result: OBITUARIES: still nothing, under either Hovencamp or Mendoza. Her 2003 obituary remains unfound. NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES: THIRTEEN New Jersey Herald articles for Ruth Hovencamp, 1963 to 1999 - and newspapers.com, which holds that paper well, returns NOTHING for the surname in New Jersey. The two services genuinely do not index the same thing, which is the whole reason the standing rule demands both. The first opened is her WEDDING REPORT with a PHOTOGRAPH -> [J.568]: married 6 Sep 1970 at the parsonage of the Sussex First Baptist Church, her mother named as 'Mrs. Ella M. Ogden of RD 2, Sussex', the couple to live at 3 Fourth St., Sussex, and she lately elected Sussex County president of the American Legion Auxiliary. TWELVE REMAIN UNOPENED and are carried as a todo at [J.568]; the 12 Sep 1999 item is the one to open first.

Result: SUPERSEDED THE SAME DAY - the maintainer logged in and the search was re-run; see the signed-in genealogybank row above. The original not-signed-in note is kept because it is the reason the re-run happened: had the unsubscribed 'did not match any items' been written down as a null, none of [J.568] to [J.579] would have been found. NOT RUN - NOT SIGNED IN. The page offered 'Login' and 'Get Started Now', i.e. this session has no GenealogyBank subscription, and no credentials were entered. The page did return 'Your search for Ruth Hovencamp did not match any items', and THAT IS NOT RECORDED AS A NULL: per the standing rule a GenealogyBank search counts only when run signed in, because an unsubscribed run searches a different and much smaller surface. The engine-search to-do for this person stays OPEN on GenealogyBank. It matters here specifically: newspapers.com has good New Jersey Herald coverage for 2003 and found nothing under Hovencamp, so GenealogyBank's different holdings are exactly the sort of place the obituary could still be.

Result: A REAL NULL ON HOVENCAMP, and the coverage probe is what makes it one. HOVENCAMP 2003: 69 matches nationally, broken down as Florida 36, New York 17, Kentucky 3, Maine 3, Alabama 2 - and NOT ONE IN NEW JERSEY. COVERAGE PROBE: Wantage in 2003 returns 7,596 matches of which 3,800+ are New Jersey, overwhelmingly the NEW JERSEY HERALD of Newton - the very paper that would have carried her obituary, well digitised for the right year. So the Hovencamp zero is an ABSENCE, not a coverage gap. Per [[reference_internet_archive_fulltext_search]] those are different states and only one of them tells you to look elsewhere. MENDOZA: not usable as a sweep - 88,422 matches for 2003. NOTE THE INSTRUMENT FAULT: the location=us-nj parameter was SILENTLY IGNORED, the result set being national (Florida 10K+, California 10K+, Texas 9K+). Same disease as the Ancestry residence parameter - a filter that ranks or is dropped rather than filtering. A Mendoza search here needs the location set through the form, not the URL. SO: she was not written up under HOVENCAMP in any New Jersey paper this service holds for 2003, and the MENDOZA question is still open.

Result: HER obituary: still NOT FOUND. But the first three results were all her HUSBAND'S -> [J.567]: William (Bunky) D. Mendoza, b. Wilkes-Barre 6 May 1938, d. 17 Dec 2008, 'preceded in death by his wife, Ruth, who passed away in 2003', buried Beemerville Cemetery. That confirms the marriage from his side and gives him a full life - Korean War Navy radio operator, electrical line worker, I.B.E.W. - where an hour earlier William D Mendoza had been a name on an index row. A LEAD ON THE DAUGHTER came from the same results page: a public comment thread about an unrelated Wantage death names a 'Diana Lynn Hovencamp'. That prompted a re-crop of the 1950 census cell, which now reads 'L Diana[?]' rather than the unresolved 'L[?]iana' - the same initial-first inversion the enumerator used for 'E Ruth'. See the reading note at [D.870]: the corroboration prompted the look, it is not what the reading rests on.

Result: FOUND, and it took one search -> [C.168]. Ruth E Hovencamp x WILLIAM D MENDOZA, Sep 1970, Sussex borough, Sussex Co., New Jersey, certificate 42402. Two rows returned; the other is an unrelated 1947 marriage to a Stephanos Mouroukis. The month matches [F.377] exactly. Note the contrast with her FIRST marriage: the 1970 form decodes a municipality, a month and a certificate number, where the 1945-48 form carries four names and nothing else ([C.165], [C.166]). Same index, same question, a morning against a minute.

Result: MENDOZA: NO MATCHES - a true null for the name she actually died under. HOVENCAMP: 2 records, and the second is HERS - 'Ruth E. Hovencamp, 1928-2003, Beemerville Cemetery, Beemerville, Sussex County, New Jersey', memorial 11428626 -> [G.684]. Parsed with scripts/fetch_findagrave.ps1, not transcribed. THE PANEL GAVE THE HUSBAND AND HIS DATES: PFC Herbert L. Hovencamp, 2 Nov 1925 - 23 Feb 1969, memorial 11428623 -> [G.685], with the inscription 'World War II N.J. PFC U.S. Army'. His death at 43 is what makes a Sep 1970 remarriage intelligible. SHE IS BURIED UNDER HER FIRST MARRIED NAME, which is why the Mendoza search was a null and why no earlier search could have reached her.

Result: NULL. Two results, neither relevant - a Gulf of Mexico regulatory comment list and a Charlotte Ruth Mendoza Jones of Palo Cedro, California. Not retried under HOVENCAMP, which on the evidence of [G.684] may be the better name; that is in the obituary todo.

Result: BOTH NULL, and both bounded. The name search returns 47 rows, ALL READ, with no New Jersey Ruth Crowell in them - the engine fuzzes heavily into Correll, Coryell, Coriell, Croall and Carewell. The county recipe returns 21 rows, ALL READ, being every Crowell enumerated in Sussex Co. in 1950, and there is no Ruth among them. So she was not living under Crowell in her home county. WORTH KEEPING FOR Ella M. (Crowell) Cooper: those 21 rows are Ella's own Crowell people in Wantage - Clarence L (b. abt 1888), Charles E (abt 1905) with wife Myrtle, William C (abt 1918), Merrill W and Irene M, Donald L and Betty E. Charles E is a candidate for the Charles Crowell, 35, boarding in the Ogden household in 1940 [D.868]. Noted at Ella M. (Crowell) Cooper, not asserted.

Result: 19 rows, ALL READ - and SHE IS IN THEM, as 'E Ruth Hovencan', wife of Herbert, Newton. Not recognised at the time, because no Ruth E. appears in the list and the surname meant nothing yet; it was [F.377] half an hour later that named Hovencamp and sent me back to this list. THE INSTRUMENT WORKED AND I ALMOST WASTED IT. Recorded because the lesson is reusable: a given-name-plus-county sweep will contain a married woman under a surname you have never heard of, so the list is only as good as the independent evidence you bring back to it.

Result: THE ANSWER, and it had been sitting in a record the catalog already cited -> [F.377]. The notes field is a DATED NAME HISTORY: 'Jan 1944: Ruth Evelyn Crowell; Mar 1946: Ruth E Hovencamp; Sep 1970: Ruth Eve Mendoza; 02 Apr 2003: Ruth E Mendoza', with father Harry Cooper, mother Ella M Crowell, b. 22 Feb 1928 Sussex, d. 25 Mar 2003. LESSON, and it is the one worth keeping from this whole morning: the file had quoted this record for ONE field. Every other field in it, including the one that answered the open question, had gone unread for as long as the question had been open.

Result: ONE ROW IN THE WHOLE INDEX, 1901-2016: Ruth Crowell x Herbert L Hovencamp, 1946, 'New Jersey' -> [C.167]. Against the Mar 1946 name change in [F.377] and the Newton household in [D.870], that single row is the marriage.

Result: NOT A NULL, AND NOT AN ANSWER - the index cannot discriminate in the window that matters, and that is the finding. NO Ruth Cooper marriage anywhere in this index is placed in SUSSEX COUNTY, 1901-2016. But the rows before about 1949 CARRY NO COUNTY AT ALL: their place column reads simply 'New Jersey'. Six such rows fall in the window - 1945 Joseph S Gray, 1945 Ronald H MacPherson, 1946 Thomas J Golden, 1946 William C Lindengrass, 1947 John D Geils, 1948 Joseph R Sanders - and any one of them could be her. None is indicated. THE DATED-PLACE ROWS IN THE WINDOW ARE ALL WRONG COUNTIES: Mar 1949 Newark (Jenni Berry), Mar 1949 Kearny, Hudson (Collin Weir), Jul 1949 Elizabeth, Union (Willi Black). The Kearny row is the only 'Ruth E Cooper' before census day and is NOT adopted: Kearny is fifty miles from Wantage and nothing but the initial connects them. The two later Ruth E Coopers, Nov and Dec 1950, are after census day and so cannot explain her absence from the household. WHAT WOULD DISCRIMINATE: the index images themselves for the 1945-48 volumes, which carry a place CODE even where the Ancestry index does not decode it - exactly the situation [C.161] to [C.164] were read out of. That is the next move and it is a reading task, not a search. CORRECTION, SAME DAY: the closing sentence above was wrong and is retained so the change is visible. It said the 1945-48 index IMAGES 'carry a place CODE even where the Ancestry index does not decode it', reasoning from [C.161]-[C.164], which are 1950, 1965, 1975 and 1977. That was an inference from later volumes, not a reading of these ones. The 1945 and 1948 pages were then pulled and read ([C.165], [C.166]) and the form for those years has NO place column at all - four names and nothing else. Ancestry's bare 'New Jersey' is faithful to the document. The route is CLOSED, not merely unworked.

Result: THE ROUTE IS CLOSED, and the negative is about the FORM. Both years carry exactly four labelled columns - wife's surname before marriage, her Christian name, husband's surname, his Christian name - and the two unlabelled columns to their right are EMPTY, read at 2x on both pages. No county, no month, no certificate number. The 'B-I BINDING' lettering on the right of the 1945 sheet is a filming target, not a column head. 1945 and 1948 bracket the whole candidate window, so the three unread 1946-47 rows were deliberately not pulled - the form cannot discriminate, so their images could only reproduce Ancestry's index. Entries [C.165] and [C.166]; the candidate set is listed in [name.217]. ALSO LEARNED, and worth more than this search was: on coll. 61253 the marriage_x=1-0-N range token is IGNORED and the real window is plus or minus ONE year. Probed three ways. A date-filtered sweep of this collection that trusted the token would return a confident false null.

Result: FOUND the household -> [D.869], and SHE IS NOT IN IT. Reed R 41, Ella M 42, Reed R Jr 20, Elsie M 16, Marion E 13 and a fourth daughter Joan N 9 - no Ruth. She was 22. So her 1950 gap is now BOUNDED rather than closed: she had left her mother's house by April 1950 and must be sought under a married name, or as a lodger or live-in worker. That is worth more than another null on her own name, which is what a search for 'Ruth Cooper' would have produced.

Result: FOUND -> [D.868]: Wantage Twp, Sussex Co., household 7, where she appears as 'Ruth', daughter, 12, under the Ogden surname ditto. THE SURNAME COOPER IS NOT ON THE SHEET, so no search on her own name could ever have reached her - the 'no search recorded' on the worklist was concealing a gap that was unworkable from her side. The route in was the stepfather's name, which the catalog has only held since [C.160] was found on 2026-10-19, three days before this search. The plate also gives two half-sisters the catalog did not have, Elsie (6) and Marion (2), and a Charles Crowell, 35, boarding.

Result: NULL - other Ruth E. Coopers (Lyonsdale NY 2006, Port Richey FL 2019, Augusta GA May 2003 - born Kearny NJ, a retired restaurant owner; not opened, and the date (25 May) is not hers (25 Mar 2003)).

Result: NULL: no obituary matches (the database showed 8 newspaper-archive hits, not opened).

Result: Not run.

Result: Not run.

Result: NULL on the first page - Ruth Helen Cooper (1928-2013, Palmyra NJ, parents William Cooper Sr and Emma Alice Roach) and Ruth Carr Cooper (1923-2003, Summit NJ, parents William Mifflin Cooper and Edith Hendrickson Kingdon), neither this Ruth.

Result: Not run.

Result: FOUND: Sussex birth index 22 Feb 1928, vol. 14 p. 184, under both Cooper and Crowell [F.328]. NULL: Harry's 1930 and 1940 households not found in the index under Sussex (1910 and 1920 are his parents' households; 1950 [D.356] he is alone); Ruth's 1930/1940/1950 not identified - a 1950 'Ruth Cooper', b. 1929 N.J., wife of Robert A., Mount Arlington, Morris Co. (1:1:6F9Y-HCTL) is not her unless she married a Cooper; no marriage, death or land record found (married name unknown).

Result: FOUND (record 47978586): 'Ruth Evelyn Crowell', b. 22 Feb 1928, Sussex Susse[x], New Jersey; d. 25 Mar 2003; father Harry Cooper; mother Ella M Crowell. Gives her middle name (Evelyn), her death day, and both parents by name.