Post Updated 13 Mar 2022
In my post, The Two Minnies, I wrote about finding two girls in the Charles Head family named "Minnie", either of whom might be my grandmother, Mary Head. As described in that post, I found enough evidence to conclude that it was the younger of the two, born around 1875, who married William Poole. But that left unresolved the more fundamental question of why there were two girls in the family with the same name and where that second girl came from.
Let's review the problem. In the 1880 census, Charles and Bridget Head have a single daughter, Mary. She is 16 years old. Twelve years later, in the 1892 New York State census, there are two Minnies (a common nickname for Mary) living with them. One is 25 years old now, consistent with the girl from the earlier census. The other girl is 16. Who is the that younger Minnie? Where did she come from? The 1892 census does not list family relations and at the time I had found no earlier source of information about my grandmother.
But now we do have more information!