Serendipity, the magic of an accidental discovery, may strike when the book answering your brick wall question falls off the library shelf at your feet. If you have been doing genealogy for a long time, you may indeed have encountered serendipity when you found such a book, obituary or military record.
But such a stroke of luck may only come once in a lifetime. I would not want to spend my time walking aimlessly through library stacks, hoping for luck. It’s like digging for gold. You can be more successful if you dig in the place where gold has been found before. So you need to research records that have proved dependable and that lead to other good records. You need to learn about why certain records were created and who was affected by those records.
Texas, for example, paid pensions from 1899 until 1975 to impoverished Confederate veterans and their widows even if they had fought for another Confederate state. But the state required that the veteran have been a Texas resident before 1881. If your Confederate ancestor fought from Georgia but moved to Texas in the 1890s , you may find that the veteran filed for a pension in Texas but was denied because of the residency date. You should also check the Georgia pension rolls (1879-1960) to see if he applied there first.
Here is my recipe for serendipity: (1) Focus on one person or family group. (2) Identify their location and the dates they came there and left. (3) Look at every record for that location and that date span in every database – not just Ancestry.com and not just online databases. (4) Say “hooray” when serendipity strikes.
For seekers of genealogy gold, the maxim should be, “The more research you do, the luckier you get.”
~ Carol Cooke Darrow, CG, is a member of the Colorado Genealogical Society.