Thursday, October 10, 2013

Almost serendipity

My Ancestry.com account is going to expire in three days.  I am not going to renew it.  Last time I renewed, I paid $135 after tax and this time, it's going to be nearer to $185.  I'm going to go it alone for a while.

So, today, I was looking at my hints for any last minute additions before I was stuck with Ancestry Library Edition....

I happened to look at a hint for my 3rd Great-Grandfather, Henry Seamens (1839-1904 Cayuga County, NY).  The only hint was a family tree hint.  Normally I don't look at those unless they are more closely related, but this time, I did click through and they had Henry's residence as Bristol, Massachusetts, 1687-1933.  This was an obvious error, but I thought I'd click through and see what record provided this anomaly...this was it:

Henry's daughter, Dora is my GG Grandmother.  This book traces back the family to 1687.  Not indexed by Ancestry.com, so it never showed up as a hint.

This book was listed as privately printed in 1933 in Syracuse, New York.  I was pretty bummed that I wouldn't get a chance to look at the whole thing in three days.  On a whim, I plugged in the author's name into Worldcat.org:
The supremely awesome Clayton Library for Genealogical Research here in Houston, amazingly, has a copy of this book.  Heh.  Pretty close to serendipity for me!