Years ago I subscribed to Ancestry and exhausted all the leads I could find there.

Yes, that sounds a bit impossible considering they have millions of records…but this was years ago.

I was researching in Quebec and New Brunswick and just wasn’t finding what I wanted in their database at the time.  I was having more success with offline sources.

I then got busy with a new job and let my membership go for a time.

I recently re-subscribed through Ancestry’s free trial and WOW!

In the last few days I’ve been finding record after record. My genealogy friends on twitter are probably getting tired of hearing me crow about this!

Some records I had before and some I didn’t.

The New Records mean NEW LEADS!

Country of Origin and Residence

With regards to my gg-grandparents, James Kerr b. 1804 married to Jane Henderson b. 1810 Ireland I’ve found Canadian census records from the 1851 and 1861 census that state their birth was Ireland and places their residence as Sherbrooke County, Canada East (Quebec). This I had before.

Valuable Church Records

It was the Methodist church records of the rest of the family members I didn’t have. What a windfall!

I now have the following records:

• Death and Burial Records Compton Methodist Church – James Kerr d. 1873(my gg-grandfather)

• Marriage of William Kerr and Sarah Maria Ball  1873.  (my g-grandparents)

• Death record of William Kerr 1924. (my g-grandfather)
• Birth, Marriage, death records of two of William and Maria Kerr’s children
• Birth, Marriage and Death records of several of William’s siblings and their children.

• Birth and Baptism of Homer Kerr 1881. Hatley (Church of England), Quebec (my grandfather).

• Census Record  of Homer Kerr and Elizabeth Wilson 1916 in Saskatchewan (my grandparents).  Okay…there was an issue with earlier Quebec census records for Homer Kerr.  He was called “Bomer”   Yes, Bs and Hs are very similar.  It doesn’t matter. Someone took the time to index all of those records and I am grateful.   I found him!

I was accessing the BMD records through the Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection) 1621-1967. According to their web page there over 14.5 million records now.

If you were like me and let your membership go, consider trying again. You can always cancel after the free trial if you aren’t finding what you want.

I’ve been having FUN, FUN, FUN finding these records. Normally you go for ages just finding a genealogy tidbit here and there.  Genealogy friends can relate to the FUN I’m having

I’m thinking of upgrading from the Canadian collection to the World Deluxe Membership. I’ve linked to some of the census records below.  Give them a try.  Maybe you will have genealogy FUN too

[Note to my KERR first cousins reading this - drop me a line if you wish to have a copy of these records]

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Census links for Canada:

1851 Census of Canada East, Canada West, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia

1861 Census of Canada

1871 Census of Canada

1881 Census of Canada

1901 Census of Canada

1911 Census of Canada

Census links for US:
Search US Federal Census Records
Search the 1930 Census

Other countries I’m researching:
Ireland: 1841/1851 Census Abstracts (Northern Ireland)

Ireland: 1841/1851 Census Abstracts (Republic of Ireland)

1861 Scotland Census

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US free trial and Canadian free trial

1) If you won the grand prize in the Ancestry.com Ultimate Family History Journey Sweepstakes of $20,000 for genealogy travel to places of your choice, where would you go, and what would you do?

2) Tell us of your dream genealogy trip using the prize money in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this post, or in a comment on Facebook.

We would go on an extended roots trip to Scotland and Ireland.

First we would go to Peterhead, Scotland where my Grandmother WILSON was from and live there for a month or so and soak up the atmosphere.  Perhaps I would find distant cousins.  I’d look up records, hang out at the local genealogy society centre, take photos and read about the history of the times when Granny was there.  My husband and I would explore around the area and up and down the coast.

Secondly we would travel to Northern Ireland near Belfast from whence my IRVINE relatives came.  We have relatives still living there very close to the airport.  I would do some genealogy research and perhaps I might even make headway on discovering where in Ireland my KERR relatives were living before they emigrated to Quebec.   Ultimately I would love to get the KERRs back to Scotland but one adventure at a time.

I’m sure a couple of months of traveling around searching for my ancestry while paying for flights, hotels and car rental, food and genealogy records would eat up the $20K in fast order.  If there was any left we’d just have to stay longer

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Related:
Ancestry.com Free Trial

What I found was interesting.   I noticed the “Genealogy” search term trend (blue line) has been drifting downwards rather significantly over the last five years. The  “Roots” (red line) search term has drifted downwards slightly but not as significantly as genealogy.  The searches for the term “Ancestry” (orange line) has been fairly consistent over time.  The graphs on the bottom part of the figure are showing news reference volumes.  It seems the term “Roots” is in the news more and not necessarily with reference to the genealogy context.

Even more interesting is the country distribution of people using these terms to search:

New Zealanders search the word “Genealogy” more than any others in the world.  (see graph below) Canadians like the search term “Roots” more than any other country.  Americans tend to search fairly evenly for both “genealogy” and “roots” as do the Australians.

Country distribution for the three search terms