Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - My Very Best 2010 Research

This post is in answer to Randy Seaver's posting on his Genea-Musings blog.

From his blog post:

It's Saturday Night again (I know, you just celebrated New Year's Eve - are you home for the night?) -- time for some Genealogy Fun (what else is there?)!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1)  Decide which of your (many?) genealogy research adventures was your "very best" (your definition). 

2)  Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Status report or comment on Facebook. 

I think mine would definitely have to be finally finding the marriage date of my great-grandparents John A. Blom and Jeanette Moes.  The Blom/Moes lines have always seemed to elude me ever since I started researching my family tree around 1996 and I had always gotten stuck trying to get past my great-grandparents. 

This past August I recently got back into researching my family with a passion, and after listening to hours and hours of podcast episodes of Genealogy Gems and The Genealogy Guys, I tried going about my research a little differently, using ideas heard throughout the shows I had been listening to.

I initially had guessed that my great-grandparents had been married between 1920 and 1930 based on the 1920 and 1930 US Federal Census Records I had found for each of my great-grandparents.  I had been browsing newspaper articles and on archives.com, had found an article in April of 1926 that had listed my great-grandmother Jeanette Moes under her maiden name.  Well, my grandfather was born on July 4, 1930.  I found my great-grandparents living together in the 1930 census with my Great Aunt Lois, so I knew by 1930 they were married. While browsing further newspaper articles though, I found a birth announcement for my grandfather's oldest sister, Lois from October of 1926.

Using this information I had successfully narrowed down the marriage date to being between April and October of 1926 but I still didn't have an exact date.  Until I found an index online of the Lake County, Indiana Marriage Indexes.  The index only listed up to 1920 but something compelled me to check anyways just in case, and wouldn't you know it... I found them!  Under both bride and groom listings there before my eyes on my laptop screen was the names, date of marriage, date of application, date the license was filed, the book and page numbers of the applications.  So, $3.00 plus a mailed request later, I was able to get my hands on the documents that confirmed that my great-grandparents were married on April 15, 1926 in Lake County, Indiana. 

What I realized after I reviewed the marriage license applications and the marriage certificate and re-visited the newspaper article mentioning my great-grandmother in April of 1926?  Great-Grandma was about 3 months pregnant with my Great Aunt Lois when they got married.  The "miscellaneous" shower mentioned in that April news article must have been in reference to both a bridal and baby shower unless I am mistaken on that.  

I think the above case is my best research of 2010 because I had to use several different sources to investigate and narrow down the exact date that my great-grandparents were married.  It was so exciting when I finally found them in the marriage index, and I'm sure my husband thought I was crazy when I did my little genealogy happy dance the day the marriage documents had finally arrived in the mail to confirm what I had found in the marriage index and proving just how useful the research techniques I had learned from the podcast episodes were.