This weekend, Randy wants us to comment on what genealogy fun we've had in January, what happenings do we consider the highlights of January, 2026?
One highlight for me in January was playing around with FamilySearch's "Simple Search." That gave me hours of fun, as it presented me with a huge fountain of sources for my ancestors. And I'm not done yet.
Oh, sure, there have been some searches that turned up nothing or next to it, and there have been searches that have turned out to be an exercise in Finagle's Law ("Any port my ship enters is someone else's home port, not mine"). But overall, I have found a huge number of sources to run down, investigate, analyze, and evaluate. This has brought some of my family lines forward by leaps and bounds.
Another highlight shed a blanket of comfort over a sad occasion: One of my dearest friends, who has been more a sister to me than my own sister for forty years, died on 4 January. It was rather sudden, but not truly unexpected. But I miss her! The blanket of comfort: she was not just a friend. It turns out she was kin, my 16th cousin once removed. So now I have a whole passel of new kin to research. I'm in contact with this new cousin's sister, another cousin. We're exchanging genealogical information.
In light of January having been a particularly tough month for my family, these highlights have been a welcome reservoir of joy to me.
3 comments:
My condolences on the loss of your close friend, but fun finding out that she was a distant cousin. I need to try out FS Simple Search.
I'm sorry you didn't find out your friend was your cousin until after she had passed, but now you can remember in additional ways. And I haven't even heard of FS Simple Search until now, so thank you for educating me about it.
Actually, Janice, I found out just before she died, and did at least have the chance to tell her. Her reaction: "I guess that's why we hit it off so well right from the start." But we did not get the opportunity to have more fun with the relationship. Simple Search is not perfect, of course -- lots of false trails, lots of irrelevant returns (why aren't search engines more robust when they certainly can be?) -- but then you get a gold mine! It's just one more good tool in our arsenal of genealogical tools. Have fun poking about with it.
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