About a week ago, I knocked down one of those brick walls that we sometimes hit in genealogy, thanks to the help of other researchers through internet. For around, twenty years I was barking up the wrong tree, all due to a court record misspelling, & place of birth error. It started while researching my great-grandfather, Isaac Wesley Thomas (b. 1853) at the Marshall County court house, in Plymouth, Indiana. There, I found two separate marriage applications, in which he listed his father as: Isaac Thomas, his mother as: Betsy Harnerson and his birth place as: Perry County, PA. So, I checked the 1860 census for an Isaac Thomas with a wife by the name of Elizabeth or Betsy, with child named Isaac, born in Pennsylvania, and found no matches. Unfortunately, Isaac Thomas was a very common at the time, and Ancestry.com and the internet were not available at the time. I searched every resource available to me at the time to no avail. Now, thanks to the internet and Ancestry.com’s Family Tree Search, lo and behold, I have found my Isaac Wesley Thomas in one of the family tree databases. I discovered his mother’s maiden was “Harmirson,” not “Harnerson”. I also later concluded his birth place was Marshall County, Indiana, not Perry County, PA. The data I saw said that Isaac Wesley Thomas’ mother, Betsy had died in 1856. By 1858 his father, also named Isaac, had removed to Stark County, Indiana and remarried. With that name correction, I was able to go back another three generations, as seen here: http://carl.rhodesfamily.org/pedigree.php?personID=I172&tree=Carls I’m exited more ancestors to research!

Have good hunt, and all the best,

Carl