Your story proves my point.
Any reasonably intelligent adult in the year 2005 with access to an Internet connection and with a few names and dates supplied by the family Bible or old letters and such should have been able, within four weeks, to trace things back several more generations.
Unless you have a "mystery person" like your grandfather in the mix - that is obvious!
My remarks above obviously do not apply to people who are 1) adopted or 2) have a near-ancestor "without a past."
So, "her father died when she was a child." Well, didn't her mother have any papers on her husband? Old keepsakes (birth certificates, photos of her dead hubby's siblings and parents, etc.)?
(Never could understand how effectively some people would erase their pasts - die without leaving behind memoirs, family stories, photos, old birth certificates, etc. - stuff everyone of course takes and today digitizes and places on the Internet so that distant cousins can profit from them.)
Regards,
It is easy to trace parts of your ancestry so long as things were recorded when the events happened, births, deaths, marriages, etc.
In my mother’s case, her biological mother died when she was a toddler, the father remarried and had another child and the father died shortly afterwards, leaving my mother and 2 siblings to be raised by her stepmother. All this happened before my mother was 11 years old.
It’s obvious my Grandfather’s name was changed at some point, but after years of research we can’t find anything to indicate when he came to the USA or where he immigrated from.
Just to show you how things change, my Grandmother on my Father’s side of the family was born in 1906, she was born out in the middle of the woods of rural North Florida, there were no hospitals to go to for the birth of my Grandmother, a midwife was present to help the mother thru birth, no birth records were ever recorded, we don’t know exactly what day or year she was born, the 1906 date was a best estimate.
In fact when I was a child, as a family we went on a vacation to Canada, which required a birth certificate to enter, my Grandmother could not produce a birth certificate because her birth was never recorded, we had to get an affidavit signed by people who knew her as child to say, when they thought she was born.
Her birth was a little over 100 years ago, imagine what the records were like 200 years ago or longer.