Fun With Genealogy

I've been chasing some fairly elusive ancestors for many long years now and have found so many problems with existing records that it's enough to make my hair turn even greyer than it already is. I've longed to know more about my paternal genealogy in particular because I never knew my dad or his family and have had only passing acquaintance with my cousins on that side of the family. Last summer we all met in a tiny backwater village in Southeast Ohio to lay my aunt's ashes to rest in a cemetery filled with many of my ancestors. It reawakened in me a burning desire to continue the chase trying to find ancestors of mine about who I know so little. My grandmother, two of her sisters, my aunt and a paternal cousin of my father's with whom she shares common ancestors with my grandmother were all DAR members and I had hoped against hope that their genealogical records would answer some burning questions I've had about my ancestry, but instead, it's created more questions than ones answered. There are so many maddening puzzles to solve. On my paternal grandma's side, going back to the original colonial ancestor from the early 1600s, everyone had 10-12 kids who married and had 10-12 kids who married and had 10-12 kids and so on, and every son or daughter was named either David, Daniel, Samuel or Sarah and all of the men married women named Hannah or Sarah. I guess those were very popular names in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. No surprise there, given that those are very Biblical names, but it makes it really tough to track down which ones of those are our direct line and which are ancillary lines. Grandma's English ancestry produced thousands of relatives and it is very challenging to follow those lines through time. There was also a fair amount of intermarriage of families to further confuse family trees. Needless to say, this becomes like a giant puzzle with missing pieces and you do not know which are the right pieces to finish the puzzle. Add to that the fact that you cannot always count on correct spellings of names or correct dates in records and it further makes things confusing. I found a death record for a 3rd great grandmother that declared her age at death to be 62 years, 5 months and 10 days, but when I found her marriage record, she would have been too young if her age at death was correct. A tombstone inscription places her age at death to be 67 years, 6 months and 24 days old. So there is an obvious age discrepancy between the probate death record and the tombstone birth date. These are just the kinds of things that one must deal with when doing genealogical research. It takes a great deal of patience and perseverance to be able to find the answers that you seek when you are doing genealogical research. You just have to stick with it and never give up, no matter how many brick walls you run up against in the process!