Another weekend has rolled around after another busy week, but it’s time for my favorite activity – Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver.

Randy’s come up with an interesting challenge for us:

1)  All genealogists are human, and most of us have made gone on wild ancestor (goose) chases in our genealogy research career.  What was one of the wild ancestor chases in your research?  Explain the situation and how you (hopefully!) solved the puzzle.

I have to admit I’ve been on more than one wild goose chase in person and in research, but one of each pops into my mind so I’ll share both stories.

The in-person wild goose chase took place many years ago – in the early 1980s – when I was very much a newbie family historian. Dave and I were in Massachusetts visiting relatives and took a day to visit Gloucester because I have a number of 1600s ancestors who settled there. I had found transcriptions of their epitaphs in the NEHGS Register and got it in my head that I wanted to see the gravestones of two ancestors who died in the early 1700s and were laid to rest in the Old Burying Ground.

Well, it seems to reach that cemetery, which was quite wooded and overgrown, we had to drive our car through someone’s backyard, past their clothesline! It was hot and humid, but I was determined to find their graves. Dave wasn’t as thrilled about spending vacation traipsing through the weeds. After maybe a half hour or so, he announced that we were leaving. My reply was that we were definitely NOT going until I found the two graves. It took more weed-traipsing, but we finally found the graves of James (11667-1737) and Deborah Sayward (1670-1734) and Dave took photos of them. I was thrilled because they were the oldest gravestones I had found for any ancestors. Dave was even happier because it meant we were getting out of there!

My research wild goose chase was about 12 years long. In the late 1980s, I started researched my husband’s Williams family, as his great grandmother was a Williams. She was the daughter of John Christopher Williams, who I discovered was born in Arkansas in 1848. I used the old AIS census index for 1850 Arkansas and, over several months time, I began with “A. Williams” and worked my way through 100+ Williams families living there. Eventually, I found John – he was the son of William A. Williams and it was just about the last Williams listing in 1850. Just my luck!

However, that led me to my Williams project that took me back though Tennessee to Cumberland County, Virginia. From that starting point, I decided to trace all the descendants of Thomas, Mathias and Roger Williams up through the end of the Civil War. That took me westward through many states.

It was my intention to self-publish a Williams handbook, which I did in June 2001. The original volume was 149 pages long, fully indexed. Of course, I couldn’t set aside my project after that many years and I’ve added to the Word document as new information has come to light. It’s now about 250 pages long and I still work on it from time to time, as I hear from descendants asking for help.

Those are two of my favorite wild goose chases. Thank you, Randy, for a fun one this week.