I'm stumped with my gg gf, and am coming at him sideways. It's always so much fun when you find someone!

Good luck with your gg gf. I hope he isn't one of those they mis-spelled so badly you'll never recognize him. One of my English ancestors, Wilfred Annetts, was transcribed as Wolfo Arrenti, but in all fairness, the census-taker's writing was very hard to read. It took me years to find him here as I had no idea where he'd moved to once arriving from England.

I found my late mother-in-law, my father-in-law, both grandmothers and one grandfather. I had to give it a rest or I think I would have gone blind. I might have to wait until California is indexed to find my Granddad, because there were just a TON of people living in Madera County, California.

Now that's a great day! I hope your Granddad shows up easily. Yes, heavily-populated areas are a bit discouraging to search. I was lucky with mine in Michigan only because I'd just found his death record for 1941 and knew the district in which he was in then.

Early last year I had decided to end my subscription, at least for a few years while I got caught up with other sources and some much needed documentation and database cleanup. As you might expect, I had a mini-breakthrough in the last week.

So I used a firefox extension called "ScrapBook" to race through many many dozens of Ancestry and census pages, downloading them automatically for offline browsing. Then it's a matter of sorting out the database entry later, but it was fast. Works well for gathering historical background as well. I don't see that I'll ever need a year subscription again.

Congrats on your find. Next question: How did he get to Michigan? Always another question.

I think I've gotten what I can from Ancestry for now until some new index comes out, but that's a great tip.

My Gr. Grandpa was born in Chatham / Kent County, Ontario ..... actually, they lived very close to the family of Rev. Josiah Henson. He married and moved to Manitoba, where his wife died of typhoid fever leaving five children. He was very poor and couldn't keep them, so left them all with his wife's relatives and returned back to Ontario, then on to Michigan, where records show he'd previously worked as a day-labourer numerous times. My family would never talk about him, they always thought he'd just abandoned the kids and skipped off to marry his first sweetie in Michigan, but census records here show he stayed for nearly three years in Manitoba before leaving. I found out the only 'proof' he supposedly immediately abandoned his family was from an aunt not many years ago who'd just assumed it and passed it on. Kind of a sad legacy for him.

Yes, there are always more questions. I had to stop completely for a while because I wanted to know everything. It's addicting!

I've got an entire line of ancestors that moved to the Upper Peninsula in the late 1800s. They came from Ontario and Quebec. Some of the children moved back to Canada so I have some distant cousins up there somewhere.

Name was Roy Tift.....don't know much about him though.

I'm really happy for you ... a breakthrough!!

I just had a big find myself the other day too (found a cousin I never knew I had!).

I resubscribed to ancestry.com via ebates.com link and got 5% off on the subscription and put it on my Discover Card which was offering 5% off on all transactions for online purchases for the month of December.

So, despite my feelings about ancestry.com I must admit that there is some good info. there.

Again, congratulations!!