Mary Beal and her Mysterious Friends

My paternal Great-grandmother Mary Beal kept what we've affectionately dubbed "the birthday book." In it she kept track of names and dates of the people she knew and loved. Many of the names in the book are just first names with dates without years, others have full names and dates with years. Over the last little while I've been attempting to help my mom untangle some of the mysteries that lie in the book.

It has been really interesting finding links to the Birthday book as I search census records and try to pull families together from the seemingly random names in the book. It's not hard to distinguish that the Beals and the Lucks are ours, but it gets tricker when it comes to deciding where the Eldridges and the Thomases fit in or if they really do. And now I've got two separate strings of Goodsells that I haven't been able to link to the Luck/Beal tree yet.

My Dad's side of the family seems to speak to me, so I feel a bit of connection with Mary Beal and the people in her birthday book. Are they all members of her family? Could some of them be close friends? Who are these people and what did they mean to Mary? I'm determined to do all in my power to unravel the mysteries of the Birthday book.