Saturday, January 1, 2011

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Your Very Best 2010 Research

It's Saturday Night again (I know, you just celebrated New Year's Eve - are you home for the night?) -- time for some Genealogy Fun (what else is there?)!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1)  Decide which of your (many?) genealogy research adventures was your "very best" (your definition). 

2)  Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Status report or comment on Facebook. 

Here's mine:

Without a doubt, it was the Jane Whittle Ancestry problem.  It is described in a series titled The Whittle Research Compendium. 

The catalyst for this research effort was the 1852 California State Census on Ancestry.com.  I found Rachel "Wadle" with three children including my wife's great-grandmother, Jane born in 1847 in Australia on the census.  From there, several Genea-Musings readers helped me with Australian and English records, and before I knew it I knew the correct names for Jane's parents, their marriage and baptisms, etc.  It was an exciting two months of online and repository research for me, and an excellent example of how a genealogy blog can facilitate research. 

I enjoyed sharing this adventure with my wife and her brother over the Christmas holidays.  To top it off, Linda's brother pulled out some unidentified photographs and portraits, and we figured out that they were Elijah and Jane (Whittle) McKnew!

7 comments:

Mel said...

Ooh, looks like I am first :D This post is about my research adventure with tombstone photographs from Holy Cross Cemetery where nothing seemed to be what it reported to be.

Tessa Keough said...

This was a great prompt. I wrote about my very best genealogy adventure today ~ thanks for starting off 2011 with something fun.

Greta Koehl said...

Easy one: The trip to Greenville, South Carolina and all the discoveries my cousins and I made about the Moores (also some about the Lewises and Tarrants for me) – and will continue to make using the documents we found. I'll be measuring all my future research and research trips against this one.

Deb Ruth said...

I wrote about connecting on Ancestry with my "cousin" Steve. That was a true genealogy adventure! I agree with Greta, thanks for posting something fun!

owlhart said...

We made a trip to Durango, Colorado, researching my wife's Conway ancestors who lived there. While there we visited Greenmount Cemetery, located and photographed many Conway family gravestones.
We also visited St Columba Catholic Church – and photographed original 1890's baptism records of my wife's grandfather, Anthony Conway & his siblings, including two previously unknown sisters who died young. All other records for Anthony Conway showed birth in 1892, but his baptism record shows birth in 1891! Wish we had more ancestors who lived within driving distance of Southern California.

Keith

Susan Clark said...

The greatest would have to be visiting Slovakia & the Ukraine soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union to reconnect with our family there. My father, aunt, sister and I met cousins we never knew existed, gathered information on the modern family, were able to see our grandparents/great-grandparents' graves and see the homes and villages my grandparents left. Nothing else compares.

Bill West said...

Randy, mine's at
http://tinyurl.com/282db92