I have 2 questions today:

1. After hearing our last speaker, how many of you went back to start reorganizing your research? Or vowed to organize it the way Suz Bates did from here on out? Or thought about it and ……?
2. My plan was to use Suz Bates’ suggestions, look for location first and see if I could locate the birth place (verify it) for my 3x great grandmother. I have all sorts of information that says her daughter was born in New York. If they have a city, it is Champaign. I thought this would be easy and then I could verify the parents’ birth places. Is anything in genealogy easy? I think not. What next steps do you take when the city you are looking for doesn’t seem to exist?

Let’s tackle the 1^st question 1^st. Did I think about reorganizing? Yes! Did I move forward with it? No. I may in the future, and we will leave it at that.

Question 2 is the challenge I am focusing on now. The reason I was focused on this, my 2x great grandmother, is that all the census reports that I have for her and her husband say her father was from England and spoke English and her mother was from Canada and on some it says she spoke Scottish and on others she spoke French. My thinking was, “go back to what your last known information, Heidi.” That would be their daughter’s birth, in Champaign, New York in 1847. It turns out I don’t know what I thought I knew. So, what next?

Genealogy is a puzzle. We hear that all the time. What do we do when we can’t find the piece we are looking for? We look for the patterns, colors, shapes that surround the missing piece and go hunting, often on the floor, in the dog dish or with the baby. My point being that you look all around to see what might match up. Could there have been a Champaign in a nearby bordering state? Could it be Champlain even though numerous different items say Champaign?

I do have names for her parents but that hasn’t helped me up to this point, so I am going to step away for a bit, stay with Suz’s suggestion, and continue to search for the mysterious location.

So I stepped away, did you miss me? I decided to look for land information, a step ahead of the next speaker. I didn’t find anything but,  one hint took me to FamilySearch where there was a birthday notice. You know, “one of your ancestors has a birthday coming up.” The first name on the list was the ancestor I was looking for. Wait! It says she was born 1 May 1847 in Champaign, OHIO! Sure enough, that place exists and has lots in it with her name….Now what? Like in Hearst Castle, “KEEP SEARCHING!” (maybe you won’t get that one)

Until next time, sign up for more classes and lets “KEEP SEARCHING” for our family history mysteries.

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com