Saturday, May 28, 2016

Serendipity: Birth of Samuel Bonnell 26 May 1707 Woodbridge NJ Town Records

One of the truisms in genealogy is when an ancestor wants his information to be found, it will be. There are countless stories to back this up. 

Here's one of mine.

I was helping a distant relative who wanted to find a marriage record in a New Jersey town's records. My local family history center had the film in its library, so I volunteered to find it for him. When I looked at the film every page was ripped, blotched and stained and the film images were so dark the words were almost illegible. I dutifully made digital scans of every page anyway. I randomly picked a page to attach to my e-mail to illustrate how hard it would be to find anything in them. To my absolute amazement, in the middle of my screen appeared the very marriage record he was looking for. It's the one with the most faded ink, in the left column just to the left of the blot.



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