Stuck in a Rut?

Have you ever found yourself constantly trying to solve brick wall and really not getting anywhere with it? I have found myself in this situation before, normally involving Andrew Blair and Susanna Akers but this time around it’s on my mom’s side of the family with Oliver Charles Warner and trying to prove that Joel Warner and Thankful Chapin are his parents. Every new angle seems to lead to a dead end.

So I began with a simple task that did not even involve researching, it was running a report in my family tree program and finding out which relatives I needed the FamilySearch number for. And it was a good task for me to do as 12 pages of individuals and I’m halfway done. This is a task where you can feel proud if you can figure out on your own where a specific person actually lies on your tree. Sometimes I’m doing fist pumps in the air in a congratulatory way, other times I’m slapping my forehead questioning how I could have forgotten someone.

Inspiration via YouTube

I’ve also tried watching videos. Late last year I became a member of AmericanAncestors.org and along with a great website I’m slowly acclimating myself to, I find myself heading over to their YouTube page and watching videos. I opted to watch an interview they had with Brian Matthew Jordan, a history professor at Sam Houston University who is originally from Northeast Ohio. He wrote a book called “A Thousand May Fall: An Immigrant Regiment’s Civil War” about an Ohio regiment made up of German’s fighting in the Civil War. I’ll admit my mom was a nurse at his doctor’s office as a kid and she always thought it neat his love of history at such a young age, I believe as a teen he wrote a book on Franklin Pierce, simply because no one else had (that may be an overstatement, but he is one of the president’s hardly written about).

Anyhow, I digress, he mentioned in his talk about if you don’t have any information about your ancestor and what they went through during a war, in this case he was referencing the Civil War, he spoke of researching through newspapers and looking up stories in relation to the regiment that your ancestor was in, because many smaller towns received information about the war from the letters that the soldiers would send home to their loved ones. So, this is my latest endeavor, as I have not been able to obtain my pension file from the National Archives due to it being closed, I am going to search for the Company K 13th Regiment of New York Heavy Artillery that my 3rd Great Grandfather, Winfield Warner, fought in during the Civil War to obtain more information on what he faced.

Okay, so maybe my new topic to take my mind off of my brick walls is not so far away from my brick wall (Winfield Warner is the youngest son of Oliver Charles Warner), but I think it will be fascinating to delve into a period of history that I am not as familiar with (I was always more of a Revolutionary War girl myself).

You never know where inspiration can hit you. If you have an hour, watch the above video, it was really interesting. Dr. Jordan was a great speaker and really highlighted a lot of details as he has written a few books on the Civil War. And I hope to share what I find on the Company K 13th Regiment out of New York with you all soon.