Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Serendipity!

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

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

1)  Serendipity! What happened when you went looking for an ancestor or a genealogical record and were pleasantly surprised to find someone else or something else you didn't expect while you were doing that search?

2)  Please share an instance when you had a serendipitous experience.

3)  Share your serenditous experience in a your own blog post, or in a comment on this blog post, or put it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system.  Please leave a comment with a link on this post so others can find it.

Thank you to Marian B. Wood for suggesting this topic.

Here's mine:

I've had so many serendipity experiences over the years and now I can't remember the details of most of them.  So I will recount my latest experience from this past week.

While I was writing my blog post about the life of my 3rd great-grandmother Elizabeth (Dill) Smith (1791-1869) in 1845 in Medfield, Massachusetts, I reviewed my research for her and her husband Alpheus B. Smith (1802-1840).  I checked all my notes for them, which are in my RootsMagic profiles and genealogical sketches, and realized that I had searched, many years ago, for probate records for Alpheus Smith.  I had found the affidavit noting that Lucy Butterfield had bought Elizabeth's dower thirds (one-third of the personal estate, about one acre of land including the house and barn) from her in the FamilySearch Catalog, and I knew that the other 15 acres were sold to pay the debts of the Alpheus Smith estate.  

However, I found that I had not searched the land records at all for Elizabeth.  I searched for "Elizabeth H. Smith" on FamilySearch Full-Text Search and up popped not only the deed for Lucy Butterfield buying Elizabeth's dower rights, but also a deed (on the same image) for Lucy Butterfield buying the other 15 acres from the estate administered by Hinsdale Fisher. 

 I will transcribe the deeds in coming Amanuensis Monday posts so that I have a proper transcription and also a proper source citation.  I also need to update the genealogical sketch and ABC Biography for Elizabeth (Dill) Smith.  

I'm not sure this is all Serendipity but if it hadn't been on the same page in the Deed Book I'm not sure I would have found it.  When I searched for "Alpheus Smith" in Full-Text Search, this second deed did not appear in the results for some reason (Smith records are very common, perhaps I failed to search more than 100 deed matches?). 

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