Glad that winter is finally winding down!

[fudge stripe cookays]

I was in the middle of a massive case of winter doldrums. I hate being cooped up and not being able to travel to Madison as much to do research.

But I finally got past some of the inertia. Ordered some films from the Mormons for the family in Tioga County, NY I'm trying to link up to my Smiths. My visit to the Janesville courthouse a few weeks ago filled in lots of gaps on other stuff.

I finally got off my duff and wrote letters to order some marriage, death, and divorce records from Minnesota, NARA (military records), cemetery records from a place in Beloit, and some wills from Sampubco.

And NOW I'm planning a new gathering near Ithaca, NY this summer to link up some branches of the family that settled near there (mine was one before it headed west to Wisconsin).

And now it's snowing again....gahhhhh. At least I'll have some stuff to do before it warms up! How are everyone's searches going?

[Rosie1223]

1. I admire your ablility to track the Smith family

I have 2 Smith lines (1 in my family, 1 in my husbands) and I just get lost in the maze of "John Smiths" I'm trying to find the birthplace of John Smith that relocated to Warren Co, IL about 1830. I thought I was onto something with the soldier land bounty records but there are no fewer than 12 land grants to "John Smith" in that county alone. *Rosie throws up her hands in frustration*

[fudge stripe cookays]

2. Have you used IRAD yet?

http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/archives/databases.html

Might be some goodies in the Births/Deaths/Marriages that could help narrow him down? I found a pair of Websters in the circuit court cases for Lake County. THAT was cool. She was divorced, and not many people knew it.

Thanks for the support. I was lucky to have a road map published in thew Beloit, WI newspaper in the 1930s. If I hadn't had that, I wouldn't have known where to start. Little did that cousin know how many people she helped in writing it. It was sent all over to various cousins, and my uncle used it to start the tree I used from the 1970s. He died in 1975. I didn't start all this seriously until 1999.

It's amazing how many little branches there were of individual research that just stopped when those cousins hit a Smith. Those brick walls were insurmountable in the days before the internet, but I've been able to tie all the dangling threads together and make a big knot. :-)

[sybylla]

3. Have any Smiths in Chenango Co, NY?

I was in Mad City a month ago looking through a published birth, marriage and death book for lovie's family and saw lots of Smiths. Think of you every time. Didn't know you were looking in NY too.

[fudge stripe cookays]

4. Not Chenango, but lots in Tompkins...

and bits of them in Steuben, Broome, Cheumung, Erie (Buffalo) and maybe Tioga (I'm in the process of proving that, if I can).

Thanks for thinking of me!

I'm stuck at the Mormons for the next weekend or so. But they're closed the 2 Saturdays right before Easter, so I might make it to Madison again soon. :-)