Wednesday, June 6, 2012

I Emailed The Sheriff But I did Not Email The Deputy

With sincere apologies to Bob Marley, the post today is about finding another way to "skin a cat". I learn something about the grand pursuit of genealogy and family history every day when I talk to Mom. Today she's hunting over in Morgan County West Virginia. It's The House/ Shambaugh line she's after. She once had a contact in Morgan County who had hold of a pile of original family documents, including letters from Mary House Shambaugh who was Mom's great grand aunt. He was nice enough to send Mom copies of some of his treasures but died before they could exchange more information.

Mom has been trying to dig deeper ever since. She hopes that her friend's archive remained in tact but fears that it might not be the case. You know how it goes: kids see all the papers as "Dad's old stuff" and toss it. It happened to Aunt Edith on the Kelly side when she passed and her son tossed out all of her family papers. Who knows what was lost. And so Mom has been on the search for that Shambaugh guy's archive.

Now you have to know Mom! She's not one to give up at all! If it doesn't work out today she'll be back tomorrow. So over the ensuing years she's been hunting down anyone who has a pulse over in Morgan County in hopes of them pointing to a living Shambaugh who has the archive. Today she popped on to the Morgan County government web site and found a Shambaugh serving his community as sheriff! So she dug around for a couple of minutes and found his parent's names and grand's names and then saw the connection to Mary House. Boom! We have a winner.

Thus the title of today's effort: Mom emailed the sheriff but did not email the deputy. He's not a Shambaugh;)

Today's photo from the Archive:

Samuel Albert House (1832 - 1913)
Son of Rebecca House (1808 - 1851)
Who was sister to Mary House Shambaugh (1814 - 1905)

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