Family Newsletter Thursday: 8 October 2009

Smith (Brinlee)

Another all-Smith week, but this was not boring work! The method of finding a family by looking at all “eligible” families with that surname over a large area (in this case, Tennessee) may sound tedious, but it’s actually fun.

Last night my husband and I were sitting in the family room, each with our laptop, when I suddenly yelled out, “Another family knocked off!” My husband stared at me in surprise. “I thought genealogy was a gentle pursuit?” “No one killed them,” I replied. “They’re not even out of my database, but they just went from Category 1 (good fit) to Category 4 (very unlikely).” A Google search for “John Morgan Smith” + Fritz (one of John’s sons) pulled up a Rootsweb message board post by a grandson of Fritz, who wrote that his “great-aunt Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Smith never married,” but had spent her life taking care of another family member. So she’s out. The fewer candidate families are left, the closer I feel I’m getting to finding “my” Lizzie Smith’s family.

I also sent out an inquiry to the person who set up the memorial to Lizzie on Findagrave to see if she could provide me with the source for the information that Lizzie was “born in Knoxville.”

Moore

(Forgot to mention this last week.) I started on the last batch of Moore obituaries. These were getting pretty far down in the weeds. This doesn’t exactly wrap up this project, but will definitely complete the first stage. I’m thinking that next I’ll start over with Samuel Moore (d. 1828, Greenville) and go down the lines again, noting and trying to fill in gaps, put inquiries out on the message boards, and check Ancestry, Family Search Record Search, etc., to see if new information pops up, and from there -- ? I’m not really sure what to do with it next. What form should I put this information in and what should be done with it?



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To the person or persons who nominated me as one of the Family Tree Magazine's 40 Best Genealogy Blogs – thank you so much! I am honored by the nomination and by the company that the nomination puts me among.