Feeling like the top investigator

As you read, one of my goals is to do 1 hour minimum of family history each week.  The work on my family has been done over and over, so I usually gravitate to Kevin's mom's side since she is a convert to the church.  It is fun to actually find work that needs to be done and find people to put into the family tree.

Sunday night I was just going to do indexing because I didn't think my brain was up to searching.  However, there was nothing to index (in English).  So, I started looking at Kevin's mom's side of the family tree.  In 2005 I had done a bunch of work there and gotten a lot of names temple ready for her for Mother's Day.  I went to her dad's family (Delbert Deloyt Brubaker) and came to his brother (Edward Dean Brubaker).  He was one of the names we had done, but I noticed he didn't have a wife listed.  Perfect starting point.  I didn't have any information except Edward Dean Brubaker and his birth date and death date.  I started first at findagrave.com.  I came to a headstone that was in Colorado matching his dates and gave Greta L as the wife with her years of birth and death.  I started looking for Greta Brubaker or just Greta, but found nothing that matched.  I finally just put in Greta in Ancestry.com with no other searching information and found a census record saying Greta Burbaker married to Than Burbaker, but her age matched.  So i looked at the original record to find the Th was actually a D.  Only figured that out because Daughter looked like Thaughter too.  So, I figured this has to be the same family.  I knew Dean was born in Nebraska which matched as well.  It said they had a 3 year old daughter named Kay.  It felt so good to find them.  I called my mother-in-law later to tell her and she said "oh yes, I talk to Kay once a year."  She is still alive.  Then she proceeded to give me her sister's name Vicky and that Greta's maiden name was Lewis and the names of both of their kids. 

The moral of the story, it was awesome to actually find someone, but maybe we should start with the people who are alive and get info they already know before wasting too much time.

I still need to go find proof of their marriage and then I can get her work done and have them sealed as well.  I'm just getting started though and it was fun to learn something and not come to a wall already in the year.