I hope you've had this experience.
You search and search and search for your ancestor's parents. You have nearly nothing to go on except the name and last location of your known ancestor. You search in unnumbered locations, databases, and indexes. (Of course, you could count them because you did keep an excellent research log and then you'd have a number, but you don't because it might be so discouraging.) You find nothing, nothing, nothing. This ancestor practically drives you to distraction. Then you find possible leads that turn out to be someone else, a different person, someone else's family. It begins to feel as if you will come up empty-handed forever, as if you will never find this contrary ancestor.
And then, suddenly, there's just the littlest hint of a real possibility. Maybe it's nothing but maybe it's something. You follow the lead, you search. You search some more. You find names, birth dates, marriage records, death dates, a will. You make possible connections between your last known ancestor and this new one. One little hint leads you to another possible source, then more and more until finally, finally....
Yes! Yes! Yes!
And you want to celebrate like crazy because you found another set of x#-great-grandparents. It seemed to take forever but you did it. Sing it on the housetops and invite the rest of the genea-world to celebrate with you!
Family history is fun without the difficult searches but there's such a feeling of joy and satisfaction when the search is long, ardent, and (finally) successful. I hope you've had that experience at least once.
This post was written for the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge created and hosted by Alona Tester of Genealogy & History News. Thank you, Alona.