Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Happier than a pig in s***

In my humble opinion - there's nothing more fun for a genealogist than to research for hours and find lots of useful data - he's happier than a pig in slop - a big grin on his face and a satisfied feeling. Sometimes I think I could do this all day and night - and I have today for about 8 hours - except for the memorial service for a friend this morning, a short nap, dinner and tending the garden tonight (since there's no baseball game). I did sneak in a blog post too.

This started a month ago when my wife was talking to one of her best friends up in Idaho - and the friend asked "could Randy research my family for me?" She told Linda her parents names and I put the sheet on my paper stack.

I found it last night buried in the stack, and thought "well, I guess I'd better see if I can find anything." Ten working hours later, I have her father's line pretty well in hand back four generations. Her mother had a fairly common name, so I need to ask her the names of her maternal grandparents names - I hope she knows!

This was all done online in Ancestry.com, SSDI, Rootsweb WorldConnect, LDS FamilySearch, Google, and the message boards. I still need to check the mailing lists for the surnames and localities. Of course, all of the data is tentative until proven, but I have some solid leads from good sources.

I have a computer folder with images of 16 census records, several Wisconsin marriages, Washington births and deaths, and SSDI records. My stack of paper for this project is around 40 sheets right now, including a WorldConnect ahnentafel report and several FamilySearch entries. I have about half of the paper file in an FTM database.

While we all know that ALL data is not on the Internet YET, there is now enough to do this survey phase fairly quickly.

I may not post for awhile :) Back to the genealogy trough of data ...

1 comment:

ginger said...

Hi randy.

I'm 53 and have been interested in my family history for some time now. I took hiatus for 20 years. After my dad retired he got the bug. on and off he has been finding bits and pieces. lots of gaps and not much family left to pick brains! Dad is terminal and gave me all info he had. not much order but between him and i there is a lot i am able to catalog. my interest has been addicting and i'm having trouble getting all i need online. i really need guidance i stumbled on to your site, and would like help. i read you are not going to be online for a while . that's fine. i have medical problems that restrict my mobility. any help would be appreciated thanks ginger