Long Lost Relatives

Everyone that knows me knows I have been doing genealogy from a very early age.. most of my memories of growing up involved my asking my grandparents about their lives, their parents, siblings where they came from etc etc. Yesterday at work I had a breakthrough on my dad's mother's paternal line!!! I had been searching for her grandparents for many years. I would search high and low but could never get past the names. As I had been going by my grandmother's handwritten notes, I took them as gospel law and whenever I would come across a name that was similar I would reject it thinking my grandmother must have known how to spell her grandparents names. After all I knew my grandparents names, birth dates, birth places etc.

Her last name which she had given me for her grandfather was Casimir Gibeault. But what I found was Gibeau minus the "lt". I was able to find his birth information, his marriage information, his death information and 2 more generations past him. I was ecstatic to say the least!!! When the person that came on shift to replace me at work last night, I was telling her all about it and told her I didn't have time to put any of my things away as I had a meeting to get to but would be back in a couple of hours. I came back to find she had never moved from where she had been 2 hours before and that she had found some siblings of Casimir and more dates!!!

When I found Casimir in the original census as a 10 year old boy with the last name misspelled I checked the enumerator's name and it wasn't a French name. And if Casimir could not read or write then the enumerator would have just written it as it sounded. At least now I can get the actual certificates to back up my finds and move on from there. Just 6 weeks before our big reunion, this was a big find to be able to place those names on my 15 generation pedigree chart that I am bringing with me. That line was looking pretty bleak compared to the rest of the lines.

It was a good day yesterday!!