I have been researching my dad's family for about 5 years now, on and off. I find that I'll pick up steam and be really enthusiastic about it for a while. Then I will hit a brick wall and the enthusiasm wanes, life interferes, and I may not go back to it for several months. I find that some information is really easy to find while other information takes a lot of detective work. I love to read details off the census or out of a directory to piece together what my ancestor’s lives were like. (I have a pretty vivid imagination, lol) I am lucky in that I have a State Library, County Archives and State Archives, and National Archives all in close proximity to me, and they all have information on some of my family that has lived in the area for a while now. I'm just coming off a break in my research and trying to get back into it. I've decided that I want to start by making sure I have all of my documentation for births, marriages and deaths for my great-grandparents.
My one grandmother is easy - she was still alive during my lifetime, and I have all of her information. Her husband, I thought was easy and that I was all set, but I started having doubts as I started looking at more information before my break. There is conflicting information on his documentation, censuses, etc on whether he was born in Indiana or Illinois. The birth certificate that I have for him from Indiana, which is where my grandfather (his son) said he was from, has no first name for the child, but the parents, sex and date of birth matched up. To feel surer, I decided I needed to contact the Illinois Archives to see if there were any births of a child around that date of birth, to parents with the same name. Thanks to IRAD, I now know that there weren't and the information I had obtained so far is right on target (everything up to this point had been progressed based upon that birth certificate).
My other set of great grandparents (my grandmother's) are another story all together. I know when and where my great grandmother died, where she is buried, when and where my grandmother and her sister were born. But I cannot find the birth certificate for my great grandmother. Nor can I find the marriage license for her and my great grandfather. My great grandfather is even more shadowy. I know his name, approximate age, and that he was from England. I found the person I believe is him on the Ellis Island site, and some census' from England (thanks to the help of someone on a message board), and I found his military records from Canada. All of the places and dates for these records line up. He disappears off the face of the earth around 1920! There is someone of the same name who pops up with another wife in Massachusetts around that time, but I have no way of telling if it's the same person. Some things overlap. It's all quite fishy. So these two are taking up a LOT of my efforts!
In my next blog I will tell you what steps I am trying in order to locate the information. Suggestions or questions from you are ALWAYS welcome!
