Already this blog is paying dividends on my ancestry research.

No, I haven’t yet had some long lost cousin offer me a treasure-trove of already researched and sourced data.  What is happening is that as I gather the information to write entries on my ancestors, I’m making connections that I hadn’t made before, noticing little details that had previously gotten by me.  For instance, I have revised my entry on John Henry Graham with details about his children.  I hadn’t even listed his children in the original version.  What prompted the revision was that I noticed the 1910 census recorded the number of his children as ten, with eight living.  I wanted to ensure that I had accounted for all ten children, so I took a second look at my records.

I paid a visit to FamilySearch’s beta web site, which has free access to many historical records.  I was able to find a digital image of John Henry’s original marriage documents and thus confirm his exact marriage date to Matilda Bohannon. I also learned that another person in my family tree, James Newton Siler Watts, had signed as security for John’s marriage bond. A new fact I hadn’t known before!

I also received in the mail yesterday Family Tree Maker 2011, the latest version of Ancestry.com’s software. I had used the 2010 version before, and found it excellent for finding and linking to source documents, including documents that I’d download from other sites (like FamilySearch), so I collected all this new data in “Graham 4.0”, the latest version of my family tree.