Welcome to June! It’s already the first weekend of the month and summer will soon be here.

As always, Randy Seaver has a new challenge for us all on Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

1)  What was your favorite genealogy learning experience this past month?  In-person program? Online webinar? YouTube video? Blog post?  Social media item?  Family history story?

Rather than watching and learning, my favorite experience this month has been “doing” my StufflebeaM project – yes, with the M at the end, not the N – and it has pretty much taken me all month to accomplish.

I’ve long known that my husband’s Revolutionary War ancestor, John Stufflebean, was one of several brothers as their births appear in church records in New York.

One of these brothers, the youngest, was Michael, born in 1763. John was the eldest of the children.

I’ve also long known that Michael Stufflebeam eventually ended up in Lawrence County, Illinois as he gave a deposition in the 1820s supporting John’s war service. That deposition identified his residence as Lawrence County, Illinois and is included in John’s pension file. It is also noted in the pension file that Michael was dead by the early 1830s.

And there I was stuck s there were no probate records for Michael in Lawrence County and the family had moved on somewhere else.

Full-text search at FamilySearch came to the rescue. About 1829 or 1829, Michael and his family moved from Lawrence County, located on the eastern state line of Illinois slightly northward and just over the state line to Warren County, Indiana.

I had found a Michael, Jacob and Valentine Stufflebeam/n on an 1804 tax list in western New York and there are Stufflebeams living and marrying in Pickaway County, Ohio between 1810-1820.

Jacob apparently liked Ohio and remained there, but I suspected that Michael there was the same man as John’s brother. There were people marrying there who didn’t fit into Jacob’s family that I believed were Michael’s children, but had no proof. These people just disappeared.

However, full-text search found several Stufflebeam records in Warren County, Indiana. Among them are 1832 probate records for Michael Stufflebeam, which identify all of his adult children, AND there is a lengthy probate file for Michael’s son, John E. Stufflebeam in 1844 naming his small army of children.

From these records, I’ve gone down many rabbit holes, but have been extremely successful tracking down Michael’s hundreds of descendants at least into the mid-20th century and even have quite a few who are living today.

After decades of wondering what happened to Michael Stufflebeam, I now have proof and have identified many more members of the (original) Stoppelbein family tree.

There are many errors identifying who belonged in which family in the limited information found online about the family so there will be multiple blog posts sorting them all out.

I even found a new spelling variant for our surname. One branch adopted Stufflebam, which I’ve never seen before. At first I thought it was a spelling error by the census taker, but several generations in multiple records used that spelling.

I originally thought that Jacob Stufflebeam in Pickaway County, Ohio was John’s and Michael’s brother, Jacob. However, Ohio Jacob is too young to be the brother and too old to be Michael’s son. My current theory is that Jacob is Michael’s nephew and the son of his brother, Jacob.

Next, I’ll need to extend Jacob’s descendants as far into the present as I can and that will really fill out the Stufflebean family tree.

It’s definitely time for the genealogy happy dance for this project.