SUCCESS STORIES


I live in (City / County):	Ashland, Middlesex, MA
Name:	Vicky Farmer hoptoad@flash.net
Date:	2000-04-20
My Favorite RootsWeb Tool:	GenConnect
Please contact me:	yes
My Success Story:	My parents were never very interested in genealogy. Most questions I asked them about my ancestors were answered with "I don't know." I had an album full of photos, but few clues on who these people were. Last March, I posted a message on a Farmer surname board. I got a few responses, but none of these people seemed to know anything about the Farmers I was looking for, so I just forgot about it. Then on December 2nd, an email arrived saying, "I think you and I might be related..." As it turned out, our grandparents were brother and sister! We shared pictures and information, so at last I had names to work with. Along with Farmer, I now knew I was descended from Karchner/Kerchners, Overmyers, and Eversoles. I looked around at all the genealogy sites I could find, but the information I found on RootsWeb was the most helpful and easy to follow...not to mention free! With the information I found here, I posted on more surname boards and was eventually contacted by yet another cousin who had even more information. Today, my database is getting very close to having 10,000 names and it all happened in just a few months' time. Since I put the new database online a few weeks ago, there's hardly a day that goes by I don't hear from another new cousin. RootsWeb is wonderful!


I live in (City / County):	Lincoln, Middlesex, MA
Name:	Charles Hadlock chadlock@bentley.edu
Date:	2000-09-08
My Favorite RootsWeb Tool:	Roots Surname List (RSL)
Please contact me:	yes
My Success Story:	Connecting a 70ish woman to the story of her Civil War veteran father: My GGGgrandfather, James Hadlock, was a Civil War veteran from Monroe, NH. In researching him, I kept coming across inconsistent information unitl I realized that there was a second veteran by the same name from the same town even though the name is quite uncommon. This research took me all through towns and graveyards in northern New England, as well as to the National Archives in DC to read the pension records. In fact, I learned a lot more about the other James Hadlock than about my own, including the fact that on the day after his lifelong wife died, when he was 72, he married a 22 year old woman, who he went on to outlive. When she died, he married an even younger woman with whom he stayed only briefly, but who had a child who was never raised with the name Hadlock. However, the welfare department in a midwestern city did file a claim with the pension bureau on the mother's behalf for support, but seems not to have gotten any action. In fact, I thought this claim had just been filed against the wrong James Hadlock file. Although I never expected to find this child, the phone rang one day with a call from a New Hampshire Hadlock who knew I had worked on the family history, and who had met this woman when she was in the area seeking information about her father. She had in fact just learned that he had been in the Civil War and was still shocked by that. Well, I was able to tall her quite a bit about him and her other ancestors and to send her photographs of his grave.