Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It's Saturday Night again -
Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Our assignment from Randy
Seaver of GeneaMusings is to:
1) Serendipity! What happened when you went looking for an ancestor or a genealogical record and were pleasantly surprised to find someone else or something else you didn't expect while you were doing that search?
2) Please share an instance when you had a serendipitous experience.
Thank you to Marian B. Wood for suggesting this topic.
Here's mine:
This is a tough assignment as I cannot think of a serendipitous moment in the 30 plus years of research. It all seems that way whenever I research.
However, this month I am researching the Shotts family, a paternal line of my daughters, and in searching for information at Ancestry about David Shotts (1760-1825) who married Mary Wagoner (1766-1862), I discovered a newspaper article attached to someone’s tree. It was about the 100th anniversary of the settlement of the Daniel Shotts family in Ross County, Ohio.[1]
This article helps me understand where I had gotten information I had gathered as a “baby genealogist” many years ago. At the reunion, they read from a book, “The Story of Bourneville (Ohio)” by J. Rodney Gragg, and the paper printed part of the story of the Shotts family. This little book is available at the FamilySearch Library and I may have looked at this book years ago but did not source it in my genealogy database, or it was lost as I transferred my database from PAF to Legacy Family Tree software years later.
I found information about J. Rodney Gragg on WikiTree and learned he was the 3x-great-grandson of David and Mary Shotts.[2]
Now, I can go through my RootsMagic database and add this
newspaper article as a source, and the next time I’m in Salt Lake City at the
FamilySearch Library, I will look at the book so I can add it as a source. I
will use this information this month to search out original sources for the
claims written in the stories.
[1] “Family
Reunion Centenary of Shotts Farm,” The Semi-Weekly Scioto Gazette, 23
Aug 1821, p. 3, col. 1.
[2] “James
Rodney Gragg (1889-1972),” WikiTree (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Gragg-867
: accessed 13 Sept 2026).
Serendipity in that it led you to another old source. Check Internet Archive to see if the book might be there, too.
ReplyDeleteI did check there and HathiTrust. I'll be at RootsTech, so I'll check then.
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