The Ancestry finds are wonderful.
I do encourage people to join if you're at all interested in finding family information and occasionally unearthing a treasure like BK did. I've had that pleasure a number of times. It's a bit pricier than it used to be, but when renewal time comes around I look the other way. I don't want to not have it at my disposal.
You will also prove/disprove stuff about your family along the way, both trivial and "major". When my dad remarried back in 2001, we all thought the world of his second wife who was a wonderful companion to him until she died some ten years later. And it just happened that her own family had a long running "history" of having been related to John Ritter the actor, and likewise Tex Ritter the country singer. This was an occasional mention in conversation, and being curious, I asked a couple of times what the relationship actually was. The answers were always vague, and one day I sat down at Ancestry and did everything I could to link her family with anyone of the Ritter clan...to no avail.
Now maybe I missed something along the way, so for that reason and just in minding my own business, I never mentioned it. It was their family and their privilege to recount their own history, substantiated or not. Though seriously, how could you not know precisely what such a link was, if it truly existed? But families are like that. And again, maybe I didn't stumble onto the right thing that would make sense of it.
It's a great pursuit, though, and for someone like BK and certainly myself, Ancestry's gradual digitalization of many city directories can be a godsend.
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Topic: THE MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE OF GUSSIE AND DAVE GROSS (Read 7473 times)