My Trails into the Past

After many years of looking, I have found the marriage date for my grandmother’s sister, Ethel Elizabeth Quigley’s marriage to John Vir Quigley. I wasn’t looking at the time for her marriage, but instead was working on World War I draft cards. I made a spreadsheet with the names of all of the men in my database who were found in these draft cards. I double-checked these names against the images on my computer and sometimes I needed to return to Ancestry to see the actual images. When looking at John Vir Quigley’s card, one of the hints that Ancestry showed was to the “Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800s-1999” database.  His name was right so I clicked on it. It was a link to The Butte Miner newspaper in Montana about the marriage of Ethel Elizabeth Sullivan to John Vir Quigley in Burlingame, California, on 20 October 1925! [1] According to the article, Ethel, a former Anaconda girl and daughter of John H. Sullivan, was married to John V. Quigley of San Francisco at St. Cath...

Our assignment tonight from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing : Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music!), is to: 1)  Marcia Philbrick wrote Celebrating 50 Years today on her Heartland Genealogy blog, and suggested it for a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge, so here it is: 2)   How many of your ancestors were married for FIFTY years?  What is the longest marriage of your ancestors in your tree (from marriage to first death of a spouse, or divorce)?  Consider, say, the last 6 generations to make it manageable!   3)  Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a comment on this blog post to lead us to your answers. By focusing on only our ancestors, I was able to make this manageable. I research my children’s ancestors so I will make the list based on that. their paternal ancestors are written in blue, maternal in green. Parents Norman Gorrell...