A Wonderful Find – Now What?

I’m so excited about some discoveries I’ve made doing research with Google since Saturday! I had read a story that one of my ancestors, along with his brothers, had a trading post in the Danville, Kentucky area around the time of Kentucky statehood and I wanted to try to confirm that.  The last ancestor that [...]

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Russell County Deaths – 1828a

After a week of Math Teacher Conference, I’m ready to get back into the genealogy mode.  Of course, every time I say that, something ELSE pops up, but that’s life! Due to a lack of vital records in the early years of Russell County, I’ve been using Court Orders to help me narrow down the [...]

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Russell County Deaths – 1827

In the quest for information on our ancestors, the books and certificates and other records with specific dates of birth, marriage and death quite often don’t cover the dates that apply to our ancestor.  Sometimes, the information we are looking for is found in unexpected locations.  As I’ve been looking through the Russell County Court [...]

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Smith Feast or Smith Famine!

I’m continuing on my search for information on John M. Smith (17?? – 1835). Here’s what I know: Russell County Kentucky was formed in Dec/Jan of 1825/26. John Smith “of Russell County” bought 100 acres in April 1827 and appears in the Russell County tax list for the first time. On Dec 31, 1827, John [...]

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John M. Smith (AKA The Brick Wall)

I’ve been researching John M. Smith for years. YEARS! He definitely falls into my “Madness Monday” category! Here’s what I know about John M. Smith I know that John was listed in the Russell County tax records from 1827 – 1835. I know that John was listed in the 1830 Russell County Census. In the [...]

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Keeping Track of the Clues

A couple of years ago, I posted several articles about using Excel to help with genealogy research.  I created my own version of Family Group Sheets and this week, I’ve begun making modifications to those to help me keep track of clues that I’m finding while I’m trying to determine if a certain family connects [...]

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Genealogy Trading Cards

Happy New Year everyone! My Christmas Break is almost over and I decided to take some time to work on a project I’ve always thought would be fun.  Being a teacher, I’m always on the lookout for fun ideas to use with my students.  A web site I came across awhile back is called Big [...]

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Andrew J. Stephens Military Mix-Up

I recently decided to re-examine a military pension file that I have for Andrew J. Stephens.  His pension packet is relatively small – only 8 pages.  When I ordered it, I was hoping to find that this was my GGG-grandfather, but instead found that this was another Andrew who had married my GG-Grandmother, Victoria Coffey. [...]

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A Tool to UnTangle?

I’ve been reading my latest issue of Family Tree magazine and I was very interested to see an article called “Finding Mr. Right” on how to single out YOUR ancestor when there are several people with the same name in the area.  As you know, I have William Stephens coming out of my ears in [...]

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Surfing for Surprises!

This morning, I had a couple of free hours before taking a trip to my mother’s where I’ll have no internet access.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  She has dial up access, which means waiting quite a while for pages to load.  But I digress… I didn’t want to get out a bunch of binders [...]

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