Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Doing the Happy Dance: Finding Answers

To be honest, I'm not sure I have ever done a happy dance after finding a key piece of information, but I do know that I have uncovered some key pieces of information in the few years since I started doing genealogy research. Even though I don't actually get up and dance when I find a new piece of information, I am cheering in my mind. So, here are a few of the successes I have had since I began researching my family's history:
  • Finding an ancestor's grave. - I have already started to write about the search for this ancestor's grave on my other genealogy blog, but I haven't finished the story yet. You can read the first three parts here, here and here.
  • Finding the county in Pennsylvania where my Civil War ancestor came from. - When I ordered Adam Oswalt's Civil War Pension file, he gave his birthplace as outside of Huntingdon, Huntingdon county, Pennsylvania. Since the information came from his testimony, the chances are pretty good that the information is accurate.
  • Finding my ancestors in the 1894 Michigan state census. - This census helped to establish a link to my ancestor to another man, who had the same surname as my ancestor, that I suspect was connected but did not have proof.

Of course, there are several other successes that I have had in the five plus years that I began doing genealogy, but at the moment, I can't think of all of them. Someday, I'll list the other successes when I have a little bit more time.

1 comment:

Evelyn Yvonne Theriault said...

I remember how excited I was when I first found my Legers in the 1930 census.
Most of my genealogy focuses o n Quebec and New Brunswick but there was a blank of a few years when my grandparents went to the States to work at General Electric in Schenectady, New York. At the time I couldn't afford an Ancestry subscription but I had a few days free trial and found them (along with my father who was an infant at the time). After that confirmation of where he worked I was able to find a General Electric Employee Handbook that gave me a real look into the working conditions of my grandparents.
This is all so much fun isn't it!
Evelyn in Montreal