The Thrill of the Search

Some people like to drive fast.  Some people like to jump out of airplanes.  Some people like to climb mountains.  It is all about the thrill.... the excitement!  I prefer to get my thrills in a differrent way.  It's all about the genealogical and historical search for me.  When I find that clue that solves the problem I was stuck on.... or just when I find out something I didn't know before, those instances are the thrill for me.

Whether I am working on my own family tree or a client's, I get the same thrill to find a missing piece of the puzzle. Even though information is more readily available to us via the internet.  But some times the indexing of information isn't accurate and that provides a challenge.

 I was searching for a census record.  The family name had been changed by the family at one time but I didn't know when it changed.  Using the census index was no help.   I had found the family I was researching in a City Directory.  I had the street address so headed back to the census records and  found the enumeration district I needed.  Then I started a page by page search.  I found them!

Sometimes the thrill happens after I have had some time to interpret the information I have found.  That was just the case as I was working on a census record for a client.  It stated that the husband and wife were from Germany and that their native tongue was Dutch.  Dutch??  I was stumpled for a while.  Then  telling my client about it, the lightbulb went on!  Not Dutch.... but Deutsch.  I had solved a misinterpretation that was over 100 years old!

I also love speaking to my clients and telling them something they didn't know about their ancestors.  Sometimes I am trying to get a clients read on new information I have found  One client now says I know their ancestors better than they do.

The thrill of bringing someone to life again that has been dead many years.  To flesh out the life of a   person who was just a bunch of vital records.  To fill in the dash between the birth date and the death date.  I like learning about what was going on in their lives as well as what was going on in the world.  How did that affect them?  Did they make any big decisions because of a world event?

Okay so maybe my heart doesn't threaten to jump out of my chest.  But the tingles are there.  These are thrills we as genealogists can have every day!