Be careful with your root diggin' . . .

We genealogical sleuths never know what we're going to uncover when we begin pursuing our ancestors.

Recently, that was proven true for yours truly . . . for perhaps the millionth time!

Without boring ye socks with all the details, I recently enjoyed a breakthrough on one of the many brick walls that litter the landscape of my research world.

A kindly researcher up in Tennessee was able to supply me with a veritable treasure trove of information that not only carried the ancestral line of my mystery forebear back to her German emigrant ancestors, but also included about 600 pages of fellow descendants . . . distant cousins, some many generations removed.

Anyway, 600 pages of this type of data is too much even for the most intrepid investigator to weed-thru. Fortunately, it did contain an index of names. What surprised me as I was checking out said index is that I recognized a couple of them as belonging to some folks around this little corner of heaven who I encounter on a regular basis and yet had no idea that we were related by blood . . . looking forward to springing this on them!

Shock and awe!