Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Best "Genealogy Find" This Week (or Month)

Today for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun Randy Seaver is asking us to brag about some recent success.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music):

(1) What was your best "genealogy find" this week (or this month, or this year)?  Was it a new ancestor, a new record, a new conclusion drawn, a new photograph, or something else?

(2) Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or on Facebook.  Be sure to leave a comment with a link to your blog post on this post.

I think my best find of the recent past was sorting out most of the wives and children of a 2nd cousin 1x removed.  I can't really list names because several of these family members are still alive, and it gets a little (okay, a lot) messy.

I started out with information I was given:
• first wife's name was unknown, no marriage date, six children
• second wife's name, no marriage date, no children
• third wife's name, marriage date, two children
• fourth wife's name, marriage date, no children

I was galvanized to fill in some missing information while working on my series of family events posts.  By the time I was finished, I had gone down several rabbit holes and dug up the following:

• first wife's name and parents, marriage date, only one (the oldest) of the children previously attributed to her

• second wife's correctly spelled surname and parents, marriage date, four of the children previously attributed to the first wife

• unknown partner, the sixth child previously attributed to the first wife

• third wife's correctly spelled surname and parents; marriage date and children were correct

• fourth wife's correct maiden name (previously listed surname was from a prior marriage) and one parent; marriage date was correct

I was stunned by how much incorrect information was attached to just this one man.  The woman who was closest to accurate was the fourth wife, with a correct surname, just not her maiden name.

I realize how relatively easy it was (it still took me several hours, though) to find this information online, from home, on my own schedule, and that the researcher who provided the original information did not have that advantage.  But the number of mistakes related just to the children was enough to throw several lines into disarray.

Ah, well, they are straightened out now.

Although I wouldn't be surprised to find one or two more children born by unmarried partners . . . .