Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – Your Best Genea-Prize in August 2014

Randy posts a weekly Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge over at Genea-Musings. Tonight’s challenge is about your August genealogical “finds.” Here are the rules…

1. 1. Did you do some genealogy research during August 2014? Did you find a great record or story pertaining to an ancestor or family member?
   2. Tell us about the BEST genea-prize (“record”) you found during August 2014. What was it, where did you find it, and how does it help advance your research?
   3. Share your genea-prize in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.
   4. NOTE: If you didn’t find one in August, tell us about a recent genea-prize from another month.

So, here goes!

The past 4 or 5 weeks have been incredible for me as far as genealogical finds. But, I decided to chose the newspaper notices for Lena Tremlett’s estate as my “Best Genea-Prize in August 2014.” I already posted about this prize, but I will add a bit about how I found it and how it helps to advance my genealogical knowledge of my family.

After returning from GRIP in Pennsylvania, I thought I’d try one of the sites that Debbie Mieszala had shared with us in her newspapers class: Chronicling America. I typed in one of my more unusual surnames, Coppenbarger, and came up with only a handful of hits. One of the hits had a long lists of names and I recognized quite a few of them.

It took some work but I finally realized these notices were concerning the estate of Lena (Randolph) Tremlett, a daughter of William Randolph & Matilda Kearns/Keeran. She didn’t have any children, so the land was being distributed between her remaining siblings and the  nieces and nephews of deceased siblings and all of their spouses.

Although I blogged about this ‘find’ before, I thought I’d include a list of those family members here. The last 6 people I couldn’t fit into my tree… UNTIL I was writing this post! (I discovered they were 3 sisters & their spouses – additional children of one of Lena’s siblings which I hadn’t discovered before.) Now, I have placed all of these people on my tree! Blogging helps!!! And, it’s wonderful to have this additional ‘proof’ that my tree for this family is correct!

Here’s the list and how they are related to Lena’s parents, William Randolph & Matilda Kearns/Keeran: