I discovered Find-a-Grave while researching my friend's family (Lockaby/Owenby) after her mother passed to find out if they had Cherokee relatives and I've been hooked ever since. After I researched her family as much as possible, I moved on to my boyfriend's Cajun family. *that* was fun. His last name was Prejean (pronounced Pray-zhahn) and between the Cajuns not speaking English and the sometimes dubious abilities of the census takers, the name can be horribly misspelled. After I did almost all of that family I've started to do random obituaries that I find, mostly at (texashistory.unt.edu), and then linking family members that I can find, and adding those when I can find records of them. I love finding memorials with obituaries, as they often provide married names for daughters and generally verify (or not) the information I've found. It seems I've ended up doing a lot of families in Texas, most of which have turned out to be in the German settlements of central Texas.

Why do I not do my family, you ask? My uncle was big into genealogy before he passed, and he traced our family (Sauter) back to the 1500's in Germany. Since I don't speak or read German with any great ability, and I'm 2nd generation American, any research would be in Germany and..well..he's already done it. :) I recently made great strides in researching my mother's side of the family, due to a mis-spellings on my grandmother's marriage certificate I was stumped, but had a breakthrough with the correct spellings of Mackenrodt and Kirschnick (rather than Mackenwoodt and Kuichnik).

I appreciate all the work that my fellow members have done here, and I'll contribute what I can.

I discovered Find-a-Grave while researching my friend's family (Lockaby/Owenby) after her mother passed to find out if they had Cherokee relatives and I've been hooked ever since. After I researched her family as much as possible, I moved on to my boyfriend's Cajun family. *that* was fun. His last name was Prejean (pronounced Pray-zhahn) and between the Cajuns not speaking English and the sometimes dubious abilities of the census takers, the name can be horribly misspelled. After I did almost all of that family I've started to do random obituaries that I find, mostly at (texashistory.unt.edu), and then linking family members that I can find, and adding those when I can find records of them. I love finding memorials with obituaries, as they often provide married names for daughters and generally verify (or not) the information I've found. It seems I've ended up doing a lot of families in Texas, most of which have turned out to be in the German settlements of central Texas.

Why do I not do my family, you ask? My uncle was big into genealogy before he passed, and he traced our family (Sauter) back to the 1500's in Germany. Since I don't speak or read German with any great ability, and I'm 2nd generation American, any research would be in Germany and..well..he's already done it. :) I recently made great strides in researching my mother's side of the family, due to a mis-spellings on my grandmother's marriage certificate I was stumped, but had a breakthrough with the correct spellings of Mackenrodt and Kirschnick (rather than Mackenwoodt and Kuichnik).

I appreciate all the work that my fellow members have done here, and I'll contribute what I can.