July is coming to a close with hot temperatures and little monsoon rain to be found in Tucson. Last night’s 50% chance of thunderstorms turned out to be another tease with a few sprinkles. However, we’ve had no power outages like some Tucson neighborhoods which means the air conditioning is working just fine!

This week’s challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy fun from Randy Seaver fits right in with the hot weather and staying inside:

1)  What genealogy search/research did you do this past week?  Did you have a research goal or plan?  Tell us about one or more search/research session.  Did you make any breakthroughs in your research?

My cousins are a bit interested in the family history and it’s many quite a few years since I worked on their father’s side of the family. (Our mothers were sisters so our connection is through the maternal side.)

In the 1800s, my uncle’s family lived in New Brunswick, Canada, but several of the family lines were pre-Loyalists living in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

I’ve spent most of the last two weeks collecting, compiling and untangling those lines, even though I expected them to be somewhat straight forward. The biggest surprise has been that the English origins of multiple immigrant ancestors have been proven in England with excellent articles published in The American Genealogist and The Register (from NEHGS).

That research has taken the English lines back to men born in the 1400s!

This has been way more time consuming than I ever thought, but it is gratifying to know how much I will be able to share with my cousins and their families. I think they’ll be very surprised!

Thanks, Randy, for another fun challenge this week.