By Shauna Scott Rhone
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Sylvia Faulkner intends to keep searching for her ancestors, even though the search is frustrating at times.

The Enquirer told the story of her search, for which she is using materials available at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, on Feb. 21.

Continuing efforts at the library and online have repeatedly run her into a series of mistaken identities and roadblocks.

Faulkner says she "ran into a dead end with Mamie Dennis' death certificate," because she can't find out the exact day Dennis died. Faulkner believes knowing more about Dennis, who raised Sylvia's father and later married a man named Louis Kidd, will lead her to more information about her father's past.

Conversations with her father, William Faulkner, who lives at a group home in Mount Healthy, still yield few clues because his Alzheimer's disease is worsening.

"I feel like I'm on a wild goose chase," Faulkner says. She did, however, pick up some tidbits from Ovell Davis, an old family friend who attended New Hope Baptist Church in Cincinnati with William Faulkner, now 79, and Mamie Dennis Kidd in the 1950s. Sylvia Faulkner says Davis lost track of Kidd and "Buster," her father's nickname, after Davis' mother died.

The missing pages of William Faulkner's life have forced his daughter to put the search "on the back burner for now."

"I tried to find out about my grandfather Will, so I could give (the information) to my father for Father's Day," but she was unsuccessful.

She hasn't given up hope.

"Before the door closes" on her father's memory, she wants to uncover more of her family tree.

The story of Faulkner's search apparently moved other Tristaters to search their family trees. Karen Beiser, history and genealogy assistant manager at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, says she has noticed increased activity at the library.

"Quite a few people called and mentioned they had seen the story," says Beiser, "and then came in and did the research. One of my co-workers told me some guy even called us one day to offer help looking for family members in the Census. There's definitely been an increased flurry of interest."

"I think the people who came in had been interested," says Beiser. "The story just reminded them and made them want to start looking."

Since the story appeared, the library has completed its cache of 1930 U.S. Census microfilm (minus census data from the U.S. Virgin Islands) and received several other artifacts of interest to genealogists.

"We recently got microfilm papers of the American slave trade," says Beiser. The collection is a complement to similar records on the Afrigeneas.com Web site.

Also new to the library's collections are more American-Indian ancestry books.

"Evidentally, the government made special censuses for Native Americans between 1901-1907," says Beiser.

E-mail srhone@enquirer.com