Meet Grandpa Duff and his family

James Kennedy Duff was born in Pennsylvania in 1819. His wife Mary Ann Bennett was born in 1827.  She's who I'll concentrate on, but James is important to my husband's family because after Mary Ann died in 1879, he moved the family to Osage County, KS, where we now live (plus I have a picture of him!, isn't he handsome?).  According to a sometimes sketchy, sometimes wonderfully detailed written down history by a gr-gr-aunt years ago, Mary Ann was the daughter of Robert and Mattie (Thompson) Bennett.  Now in the family history it mentions that Mattie's parents were Moses and Margaret Thompson and that Moses died in a snowstorm.  No dates, not other info.  Now that just pushes me to find more when someone gives me a great carrot of detail like that, so Moses and Margaret have always been one of my goals to find info on.  The other day I made a breakthrough!  I was checking into Robert Bennett's records on our family tree and I saw a notation that the proof of certainty that 1850 census I had for him was hinging on there being Kennedys & Thompsons on the same page (I refer you to James K. Duff's middle name, which is a family name too).  So I checked it out and these guys were on the same page...

I followed up on these guys on ancestry.  I have learned with other families that researching siblings has been fruitful.  And I found this...

 Looks pretty good!  So many things in genealogy after a certain point become circumstantial.  I try to be diligent in my research, and follow up and show wills, etc... too.
The moral of the story is, no matter how much you just want to keep moving backwards in the past, sometimes you have to go in a round about way, but because of that you might find some more interesting characters that make research more interesting!

Crazy times

Thinking on past winter researching has me thinking about all the crazy things my mom and I have done over the years since we started researching together.  Driving to a cemetery in the dark of night, searching by headlight and flashlight just because we didn't want to give up for the day.  Traveling down deserted roads in hopes of finding that secluded cemetery that might or might not hold an ancestor (this being before cell phones I might add).  And of course the one that led to this picture... we tromped all over this little cemetery uncovering the snowy mounds to see who's stone lay underneath.  Using our feet as sonar to find flat stones until we found ggg-grandma Pouppirt:)  Snow really brings out the inscription I might say (as well as mud, but that's another story!). I love "cemetery stomping" as we call it.