1) Tell us about one (or more) "Satisfying Genealogy Moments" from your family history and genealogy research. What was it, and how did it make you feel? You can make a Top Ten list if you want to!
2) Write your own blog post, or make a comment on this post, or make a comment on Facebook, and tell us about your "moment in time."
So a recent satisfying moment for me was my Eliza Bromagem=Lida Van Wormer discovery. I talked about it in a post back in July. You can see it here http://genealogist-in-training.blogspot.com/2009/07/so-much-for-break-in-topicsdont-forget.html
The basic jist was that my Great Great Great Grandparents' eldest child, named Eliza according to a doctor's deposition included in a Civil War widow's pension, disappeared from the traceable records and I couldn't figure out what happened to her. So I moved on and started working on other lines in a related branch but as I was looking into the family, this name kept popping up, Lida Van Wormer. The more I knew about Lida the more coincidences I was finding between Lida and Eliza Bromagem, sharing the exact same birth date for instance. Eventually I became pretty sure that they were the same person but it wasn't until I got that first bit of evidence that I really got up out of my chair and danced around. What I got was a widow's pension application made out by Lida Van Wormer under the Civil War service of her husband, Clemson. On the application, Lida states that her maiden name was Bromagem and at the bottom, Mary J. Bromagem is listed as a witness to the application. Here it is
After I received the pension application, I picked up Lida's death certificate from the Cook County Clerk's Office and sure enough, on the certificate James and Mary J. (Braden) Bromagem are listed as her parents and again, her birth date and place match that of Eliza Bromagem. So even though no record of marriage existed with the Hamilton County, OH Probate Court, I was able to figure out that Eliza was Lida because of the combination of pension file documents from both James Bromagem and Clemson Van Wormer and Lida Van Wormer's death certificate. It was a happy day for sure!
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