Starting Again Follow-Up

I wrote a post over my Christmas holiday talking about being side-tracked in my genealogy research. It was really great to see that many people have gone through the same thing and I appreciate everyone's comments!

So, what did I end up doing during my days home relaxing? Well......

1. I caught a nasty little virus on my work laptop which has cured me (at least temporarily) of going to the cheezburger network sites. Yep, something mean downloaded onto the computer while I was on the comixed site. I do miss my kittehs, but I also have 2 real life one's that live with me, and they (especially one of them) do dopey things all the time to make me laugh, so I'm okay with that. For now.

2. I spent time with my parents. :-) Sherlock Holmes was a fun movie!! Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Well, I wouldn't call it fun....it was a good mystery, but not the easiest movie to watch - some tough stuff happened.

3. I did lots of maintenance on my online life - updated and strengthened passwords and cleaned out and cleaned up temp files and trash on my home computer. I made sure my work contacts list (ie, stored in outlook) and home contacts list (stored in comcast) actually matched. I made sure I had the most recent versions of firefox, IE, Adobe, etc (see #1 above).

4. I burned CDs for family members of photos from our trip to Walt Disney World last Fall. I also pored through the hundreds of photos and picked out the best to get printed into real life photographs to send out to my grandfather so he can have pics of his great-grandchildren at Disney.

5. And finally, finally!!! I got to work on some genealogy "stuff". I had intended to do what I stated in my blog post - start with me and fill in documentation holes working backwards. But I got sidetracked by deciding to follow-up with my DAR contact on my application (part of #3 above).

A while back, I submitted an application to DAR for one of my ancestors on my mom's side. I got a letter back asking for some additional documentation to further prove the relationship between some of the fathers/sons. I've had a hard time doing that so far. I have hope that I'll be able to do it one day, but it will require a lot of time going through records in local historical societies I think. In the meantime, my father had suggested using an ancestor on his side of the family.

My father and I have split up the research so that I do my mom's side of the family and he does his, so I'm not intimately familiar with all the people on my dad's side.

So I asked my contact about submitting another ancestor while I continue to research the one and she explained what to do.

Then in a matter of days, I was able to pull together the documentation for an application to DAR on my paternal ancestor Kinsey HARRISON (from Maryland).

Why so easy? Because his Revolutionary War pension file is on fold3.com. Yay!!!!! Then I found a transcription of his son's will online that named his son! Yay!!!!! And from there I had census records and actual birth/marriage/death certificates. Man oh man did it come together more easily than my New York ancestors!!!

So I didn't spend time doing what I said I was going to do for my research on my break, but I think it ended up being pretty worthwhile. No matter what, whether my application gets accepted or not, it still prompted me to gather together some really great documentation for that HARRISON line of mine that I didn't know much about before. :-)