Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: January Highlights

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.

 

FamilySearch's Simple Search: Simply Amazing

Earlier today, I read in Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings about FamilySearch's new Simple Search.  He demonstrated it and it looked intriguing.  

I'm now in about my third hour of reading, downloading, sourcing, and getting all sorts of excited about the ton of records this simple search gave me with plain-text brief inquiries.  Asking simply for Oscar Merry Packard, my great-grandfather, in Chautauqua County, New York, gave me his baptism record and other church records, and the same on his sister, some cousins, his parents, aunts and uncles.  Then I asked for information on Joseph Hoyt III in the same location, and found my 3rd great-grandfather and his sons and a daughter, and this led to wills, marriage records, more church records, land records and more.  I found out that only three of the children of Joseph Hoyt IV lived long enough to be remembered in his will.   I have a lot of transcribing and analysis to do.

There is at least three more hours of work for me to do just examining and recording and sourcing more records.  I have at least thirty tabs at the top of Firefox's search bar, just waiting for me to look at them and determine where they fit in my family lines -- or if they do at all.  I've already discarded several that do not relate to my line at all.  And now I have a ton of new information to make that winnowing process be even more accurate.   

The search really is simple.  There's no form to fill out.  There is simply a space into which you just ask a simple question.  You may make it as vague or specific as you want.  Take a look at Randy's explanation here.  I told Randy in a comment on his blog that this is going to keep me off the streets and out of the pool halls for months!