Randy Seaver has posted the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge for this week, which is Best Find of 2016 and Research Challenge for 2017.

Even if you didn’t read my blog posts last summer, you should be able to guess who I discovered – a Mayflower ancestor! This discovery was one I never expected because it is through my maternal grandmother, part of whose family were pre-Loyalists, migrating from Rhode Island to New Brunswick, Canada in the 1760s. Grandmother would be so pleased to know that she was a Mayflower descendant and her granddaughter was pretty excited about this, too. 🙂

I wrote several posts about piecing together the clues:

1. My First Mayflower Link – Maybe – and It Only Took 36 Years!

 2. Mary Fones, Who Are Your Parents?

3. I Think It Works – George Soule Family

For 2017, I have several research challenges and I would be happy to break through any brick walls. I don’t want to be too greedy for 2017 – I’ve already done the genealogy happy dance twice in the last week with one brick wall I broke through and the success of one of my past blog posts being found by a descendant of a long time Williams brick wall – a daughter born in the 1700s. Those are upcoming stories and weren’t even on my priority list, but that didn’t make me any less happy!

I would really like to:

1. Find proof of the date and place of death of my 5X great grandfather Anders Molin. He was last living over 200 miles from the area in which he spent his life and the last mention of him was in Marstrand, Sweden when he was 47 years old. It will take slogging through probate records located in over 200 Swedish courts to try to find him. I’m hoping ArkivDigital offers a great teaser rate at RootsTech and I have a distant cousin living in Sweden who also takes advantage of free access offers. Maybe between us, we will find him.
2. I hope to be able to sort out the various Thompsons in Washington County, Kentucky, piece them together and maybe even find where their home was before they landed in Kentucky in the 1790s.
3. I also hope to be able to sort out the various Love families in western Virginia and eastern Kentucky in the same 1790s time period. The tie into my husband’s Williams family, which I’ve researched off and on for about 25 years.
4. Other “new” brick walls are found in my post Change of Pace – New Brick Walls for 2017.

As you can see, I have plenty to keep me busy.