Tap, Tap, Tap...

I found more today on my Smith side. My great-great grandparents are John William Smith and Jennie Ella Mobley, and their son Maurice Warfield Smith is my great grandfather. His brother Shelby Russell Smith has been one elusive uncle to find anything about, mostly for a lack of looking.

Just a few weeks ago, I discovered Shelby and his wife Iva Logan Smith in the 1930 census, but sadly their information was very sparse. Either Shelby was being stingy or the census taker was asking the neighbor, because it gave almost no pertinent information. But I did find that Shelby and Iva had two children, Jane and Shelby Jr.

Today as I was emailing back and forth with my uncle, I decided to poke around Rootsweb and when I looked at Shelby's death index record, I found Shelby Jr's right underneath it. It gave his birth and death dates and places. Pretty exciting! That's more than I've ever had about this family. Shelby's sister, Jane Smith, will be slightly harder to find, as she likely married and died with a different last name, but if they want you to find them, they'll help make it happen.

I enjoy getting those little taps on the shoulder. "Look in this record and see what you find..."

I found the coolest thing...

So, after the meeting last month, I'm doing the "go through every single person in my PAF file and fix all the errant names, dates, and places" thing, and trying to find missing counties or European states. We were given a wonderful handout written by a Family History bigwig from the Church (I don't know his name) that gave very specific instructions. Maybe I've already mentioned it but it's that cool - it deserves another mention.

I have some Canadian family members and have tried, several times, to locate an online Canadian county finder with no success. But, when I typed a German city into my search engine, out popped this fun little site (it's actually HUGE) that has maps of every country in the world, along with a list of each city and the state or county or region it's in. Hello??? How awesome???

So I put it in my links - it's called "Maps of the World." Look out, Canadian cities... you're getting new counties soon.

In other news, I leaned on my Dysart relatives - aunts, uncles, cousins - and have put together a new genealogy page to send to everyone. Not everyone was able to open it, so I'm wondering what's up with that, but Uncle Doug emailed today that he'd received it and even passed along a correction. Yay! Now for the Smith side to send in their stuff.