Happy Hunter

Alice came with me to the Family History Center last week for some one-on-mom time. It turned out to be quite the busy night! We had three patrons AND Alice made a fantastic discovery of her own.

I wrote about it to a friend who had just given a class on beginning family history research to a bunch of 11-year-old girls and their moms:

"She said she was going to follow interesting names [in our family tree] like you had demonstrated. Well, she landed on an ancestor that I had researched a couple years ago. The research trail had gone cold and I had left a couple questions in the Notes section that I wanted to pursue later. Well, we started looking up stuff for one of the questions and Alice stumbled upon an obituary. I had looked for an obituary before, I know it! I had this woman's death certificate in my files, for goodness' sake! Anyway, the obituary was new to me and it was a wealth of information and dates. It named 8 children in birth order, including two little girls who had died as children. I hadn't known anything about the children who died.

I'm pretty sure I screamed. And Alice did, too. We spun around in circles on those spinny chairs. Then we got to work entering all the new information into FamilySearch. In a couple years, Alice will be baptized and confirmed for those girls and we can finally get this family sealed together right. She was totally glowing with excitement for two days. What a rush :)"

Here's how she felt:

Stinkin' surprised and happy.