SNGF ~ Good Genealogy Luck

Tonight's Fun Assignment

1) When have you had a dose of good genealogy luck? What document or resource did you find just by happenstance or chance? By being in the right place at the right time? By finding a family history treasure in your family's attic or basement? By finding a helpful document or reference without even looking for it?

2) Tell us about it in Comments to this post, in Comments on Facebook, or in a blog post of your own.

My good luck was posted on this blog entry... an OMG! moment.

George W Duncan had been a hard man to track down and his wife was even worse since his son referred to her as "Miss Edwards" in his civil war applications. She turned out to be Jane Edwards. George was a man that I had spent 20 years off and on poking around trying to find him.

Tired of looking for him I thought I would see if there was any pension information out there for Jane and she lived and died in North Carolina. So I spent a night looking for all of the Duncan men on the North Carolina state archives website and finally thought to look for Jane Edwards. I was so excited when I found her civil war widows pension application so ordered a copy to be sent to me. That seemed all well and good, progress, another document to put to her life on my family tree. She had been difficult for years too and suddenly in a couple of weeks I had figured out who she was AND!! found that line of family history already documented by another family historian!

So mail day! In came the envelope and when I pulled out Jane's information, the WONDERFUL person at the North Carolina Archives thought to put a copy of the page from a book showing George W Duncan's death!! He died in Tennessee, I had been looking in North Carolina for years! It was not expected and it was an important find and solved the mystery of "just was that man the G. W. that went to Texas??" I was so glad that he wasn't!