January 2026 has gone – I can’t believe February is already here.

The final day of the month brings our Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver on Genea-Musings:

1)  1) What genealogy fun have you had this past month?  What is your genealogy research highlight of the past month?  It could be attending or watching a webinar or local genealogy society meeting,  it could be finding a new ancestor, or it could be reading a new genealogy book, or anything else that you have enjoyed.

I’ve spent pretty much part of every day this month building out the descendants of the father of my Loyalist John Adams – David Adams – through wives Susannah Lockwood and Sarah Squire.

I was actually quite dreading the entire process because Connecticut records, while generally better than New York’s records, are spotty at best and New York’s vital records are, well, pretty awful.

And, it was just my luck that my Adams collateral lines through David Adams began in Fairfield County, Connecticut in the early 1800s. Some of the family began creeping out of Connecticut into . . . . . yep, New York State.

Adding to my problems were the many females in the family, born before 1850, in locations that are missing many vital records.

My huge surprise was finding Ancestry’s U.S. family history books collection that linked to many of those elusive ancestors. Thankfully, many compilers created books along the lines of “The Descendants of XXXX in America from X to X.”

I was extremely lucky in that many of the compilers/editors recorded not only the male lines, but also the female lines when known. Often, but not always, exact dates of birth, marriage and death were provided sometimes with exact locations.

Yes, these unsourced genealogies need to be checked, but they actually turned out to be much more accurate than online family trees AND, crucially, they provided names and birth years of spouses.

With those clues, I was able to move to the big genealogy websites and trace the lines using censuses and other primary documents.

Without all these linked family history book pages, I would really be stuck.

So, the highlight of my month was discovering Ancestry’s family history books. An excellent example is Eliza Couch, born c 1829, the daughter of George Couch and Mahala Nichols. Eliza was already married and, not only out of the house, but had moved fro Hopewell, Ontario, New York to Benton, New York. It was only about 20 miles away, but crossed the county line into Yates County.

Then, this link popped up:

There is my Eliza at the bottom of the page, continued to the next page:

The bonus was discovering that this page is from The Descendants of Joseph Couch and Deborah Adams,” with Deborah being a daughter of my David Adams and his second wife, Sarah Squire! Double bonus – I was able to download and save the book from Internet Archive.

It wasn’t just one book that popped up. As I worked through all the lines, multiple family history books appeared in the links, which enabled me to fill out about 98% of the descendants into the late 20th century and a few distant cousins living today!

Here is the collection:

I believe that Ancestry’s AI has been very busy indexing these books and adding links. Like full-text search on FamilySearch, this collection is a game-changer, especially for me researching people in New York and Connecticut.

It’s definitely the highlight of my month!