Your "Christmas Morning" for Genealogy?

Question

My apologies in advance to those who share other faiths - for my use of a Christian-centric term.  But - this term is meant to capture the feeling of anticipation one experiences from the prospect of unknown gifts arriving in the very near future....

Today is April 15th.  For the past two+ years, Ancestry has been working on a project to digitize the death certificates from the State of Pennsylvania from 1906-1963.  These records will be available for free to PA residents (i.e. people who can type in a PA zip code on the PA ancestry site).  While Ancestry does not officially announce release dates, several people from the PA State Archives have stated that the first batch of indexed records (1906-1924) would be available online on April 17, 2014.  Prior to this, it was costly to order PA death certificates and it often took the state 4-6 months to send records.

So - the thought of suddenly having access to 18 years of indexed records is thrilling!  April 17th can't get here fast enough, and will be like "Christmas morning" for genealogy - at least for someone like me who has dozens and dozens of ancestors from Western Pennsylvania.  The only times I can recall feeling this sense of anticipation from genealogy is when ordering a promising Civil War pension file application and waiting for it to come in the mail.

How about you?  Any fun stories of a "Christmas Morning" for your genealogy research?  The worst is when you wait and wait and then the record gets there and you find out it wasn't your relative.  :(

Answer 1

Well, I don't have a story as entertaining as yours, but I did spend a lot of money on DNA testing, at the urging of the administrator of the one name study project I'm involved with, because he was fairly certain it would lead to the linking of two family groups. I waited months for the results...no match! C'est la vie.

Thank you for the alert about new PA records.

Comments

Ya - I know what you mean!  I am on Family Tree DNA and I always perk up when I get an email saying that I have a new match.

Unfortunately, in the case of FTDNA, this usually means that I have a match with someone who has nothing listed in his list of ancestors.

In the past year though, I have had 4-5 interesting matches with people who had the Jones surname (I did the Y-DNA test), so there is still a sense of anticipation when I see that I have a new match.

Answer 2

Well - I don't know if it is proper form to "answer" one's own question, but I thought I would post a quick update.

"Christmas morning" arrived around 11:30 PM (Eastern Standard Time) last evening, when Ancestry posted the PA Death Certificates online.  The one draw back is that they are supposed to make these available to all Pennsylvania residents free-of-charge, but that capability has not been implemented yet.

Still though, from the help of some friends and a quick trip to the library on my lunch hour today, I have already found seven death certificates that are useful in my research.  

Most notably, I found a death record for this ancestor that was signed by the Coroner and lists "probable murder" - which is absolutely brand new information for me.  Thus - I will be spending an interesting evening looking into the tragic demise of Charles Lennox of Pittsburgh:

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lennox-56

I will update this again if/when Ancestry makes the PA Death Certificates free for Pennsylvania residents, as this is a gold mine of information for people who have PA ancestors from the late-19th/early-20th centuries.

Answer 3

I have the opposite answer.  I remember back in 2001/2002 ancestry had months of hype about the release of the 1930 census.  It was very exiciting the day it was released.  However, ancestry never bothered to tell anyone that it would not be indexed and fully searchable for many months.  It was very disapointing, a lot of people were angry.