Once in a while an unexpected family treasure falls in your lap.

Some think of these happenings as serendipitous. Some think of them as small miracles. Whatever you think they are, they sometimes happen.

e rst time this happened to me, I was looking for some-
one else’s ancestors. My client believed that an ancestor had
owned property in Chicago in the 1860s, but the ancestor didn’t
show up in city directories, and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 had destroyed coun-
ty records. Despite thinking it was a hopeless cause, I did all I could to nd proof.
Nothing. Eventually I stopped searching.

Two years later, I introduced friends from the Genealogical Society of Utah to record custodians at a private title insurance company that held the only surviving land records that pre-dated the Chicago re (GSU wanted to micro lm these treasures). As we entered a room lled with large ledger books, the custodian o ered to show us a sample. Randomly grabbing one o the shelf, the ancient book fell open to a beautifully handwritten page. No one could understand my gasp of astonishment—I was looking at the name of the former client’s ancestor, a legal description of his property, and proof of the 1860s transactions. What made the custodian pull that particular ledger? Why did it fall open to that page?

Another time, it was my own family history at stake. For 30 years, I’d been searching for my Great-Grandfather Dyer’s parents’ names. One day as I was leaving a genealogical conference, a man approached me. He had been told that I had some Brooklyn ancestors and he had indexed some long-forgotten church records for the city. Having already spent too much on books that day, I hesitated. In the end, he talked me into buying his Bishop Laughlin’s Dispensations book. I about jumped from my seat on the plane ride home when thumbing through the book; I found a dispensation for my Protestant great-grandfather to marry a Catholic and the previously unknown names of his French father and English mother. Would I have found the names in any other way?

More recently, it happened for my daughter Juliana Szucs Smith. For decades I’d been searching for the origins of our ancestor James Kelly. Like panning for gold in the creek near our house, searching for such a common surname in New York City probably wasn’t going to yield anything. en came the eureka! phone call from Juliana. When the Emigrant Savings Bank records became available on Ancestry.com, she found an 1857 account for James Kelly. Incredibly, it provided his deceased wife’s maiden name, names of his children, previous residence in Halifax, and his birthplace in Donegal. ere wasn’t any cash le in his bank account, but for us, the surviving information was like pure gold.

Some people say our ancestors are working with us because they want to be found. If that’s the case, I certainly hope that their unexplainable help will lead you to long-ago buried family treasures.

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Michael Sherrod

Loretto D. Szucs,

Jennifer Utley

Jeanie Croasmun
jcroasmun@ancestrymagazine.com

Robert Davis

Chris Trainor

Jana Lloyd
Tana Pedersen Lord
Paul Rawlins
Matthew Rayback

Dara Blanchette

Amy Johnson Crow
Donn Devine, ,
Myra Vanderpool Gormley,
Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak
Paula Stuart-Warren,
Curt B. Witcher,

June Lough

Shannon McAndrews

Paula Kapacinskas 312-236-4900 x1103

Gabby Duenas 213-596-7220

Kristina Carrington 917-421-9049

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