A Second Great Mystery Solved

Click here to read about the first one.

I've mentioned before that I am a bit of a genealogy buff in all my spare time (ha!).  I recently got back on Ancestry.com after a five-year hiatus and man--the stuff you can find there is just seriously cool.  Of course, assuming you are into family history.  Way back when, I did some digging on both sides of my family, and discovered that part of my paternal grandmother's family arrived in the Massachusetts Colony from England in the 1630s.  Not the Mayflower by any means, but pretty darn soon afterward.  If I wanted to join the DAR, I'd have ample qualification!

At any rate, while working on a related family branch, I had previously run into a roadblock.  One particular woman seemed to have one of two different birth dates and one of two different death dates (in various combinations) and several different sets of husbands and children, depending on where you looked.  It was making me nuts.  I finally figured out yesterday that I was looking at a wife and a sister-in-law, who were born and died within a year or two of each other in the same area.  Both were named Eunice, of all things (yes, this was a long time ago; apparently this was a common name back then from what I'm seeing) and the one's married name was the same as the other's maiden name.  Since some genealogy sites use a woman's maiden name and some her married surname, I can easily see how the two sets of records got muddled on the genealogy websites, especially since we are talking about transcriptions of handwritten records from the mid-18th century.

Anyway, that was my achievement for the weekend (besides running a basketball practice with much less prep time than would have been ideal.)  Not meaningful to anyone but myself, most likely, but it was very cool to have finally figured out the puzzle!