in pursuit of a pedigree

My Trenton trip was just about a success. I came home with about eighteen documents and found almost all of the records I went there to search for. A few marriage records still remain elusive and I’ve just about given up hope of finding some of them in the state archives. I’ll have to pay a visit to the Cumberland County repositories in the near future since a great deal of my ancestors on the Hudson side have come from there.

I brought everything home, I filed it all  and entered it in to the databases. There were a few interesting nuggets — I was able to confirm that my possible Civil War men William Krips and John Ottinger were, indeed, part of the family, so my mother is thrilled to finally have a confirmed war vet on her side.  She’s 1-4 for my dad, because Dad already had two and I found two more. (One Revolutionary and three Civil War). I think I’ll get my DAR membership through him first mostly because my grandmother’s side is from rural South Jersey and different lines appear to have been here since the creation of man. But I might be able to slide my mom into the DAR through her Mead ancestor. It makes me laugh because she was always so sure it’d be her Hammell guys to do it and we’ve stalled at 1822 for them.

Anyway, my project for this week is to work on my census extracts. I’m attempting to achieve one of my research goals for the year by logging all the different census data to make sure that I’ve combed every possible detail from them. Once that’s done, I’ll work on researching some of the collateral people like brothers and sisters and children to see if I missed an ancestor somewhere.

After I feel like that’s done, I hope to employed with a steady job at that point so that I can resume spending some money on this hobby. I have oodles of records to send for from England and I need to hightail it to Philadelphia for those family members (unfortunately, the photo copying is just a bit higher there than NJ Archives so it’s going to cost a bit more what with gas to get there and whatnot).

It’s tough having a hobby like this on such a strict budget. There’s so much I want to do and so many books I want to buy but I have to do everything piecemeal. It’s somewhat frustrating but at least I’ve been able to maintain my Ancestry membership all along, it’s the only saving grace.