My lucky day!

I realize that I have not posted here for years, but today was a big day in my family history and I have to share it.  Last year I did an ancestryDNA test and learned that I have 20% Irish ethnicity.  I had not yet found any Irish ancestors, so was very intrigued by that.

This weekend I am teaching two classes at our local family history fair.  One is on the census and one is on the partner sites that work with familysearch.org.  I have spent about 20 hours preparing the census class.  Most of that time was finding examples from my family and friends' families to use as examples in my class.  Teaching a class requires sacrifice and that sacrifice does not go unrewarded.  I always find new things on my own family as I "practice what I preach" and test out the things that I am going to teach on my own family lines.  Most of those 20 hours were spent following leads to new avenues of research while I was gathering examples and making screenshots for the presentation.  Then I would remember that I was supposed to be preparing the class and not researching my own family and get back on track.

I had not done much preparation for the familysearch.org partners class until last night.  I spent quite a bit of time looking for good examples of things that you can find on the ancestry.com, findmypast, and MyHeritage websites.  I was not feeling too excited about any of my examples, though, so today during my lunch break, I continued the search for the perfect example to teach about the resources available on findmypast.  I know that they have a lot of great British records so I decided I should try one of my English ancestors to be the focus of the search.  I randomly chose William Eagers born 1811 in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, England, son of Joshua Eagers (my fourth great grandfather).  I don't know who Joshua Eagers' parents are, but that was not really the purpose of my search.  I was just trying to find an example that I could show of an English record on findmypast.

I opened familysearch.org to William's person page and clicked on the link to the right for findmypast.

The first result on the search list was for his christening record.  I already knew his christening date from indexed records, but I was looking for an example, not doing research.

I clicked on the little camera icon to see the original record.  And gasped!  In the christening record of Joshua's son, Joshua was named AND Joshua's father, William Eagers, weaver from Meath, Ireland!  Bless you findmypast and Melton Mowbray parish clerk of 1811 who listed grandparents in the christening record!

I'm doing the genealogy happy jig!