So What's New With Your Search

Hey ! Seadog! How are you? good to see you here! wow! cool Seadog! I looked up that name in my Whitaker book and I am no family lineage with them..........boo hoo! Glad to know though. I have a lot of Whitaker relatives in Utah, North Carolina and Georgia though!

What's your family search revealed?

I did find out the name of the husband of one of my relatives yesterday. I was looking on different web pages and came across an article about some guy in Shrule, Ireland who had passed away. I was bored from not having any success, so I thought I would read it. Half way through the article, they mention my relative as his wife. We never knew who she was married to.

Just shows, that it pays to read everything you come across. I had to laugh about that one. It was a total whim to read that article. Gave no indication that I would find anything important in it.

Oh Mike! Thanks so much for sharing. That gives me and probably many others such encouragement to look at everything!

My wife has had some pretty good luck on making contacts on her side of the family.

On my side, My Dad started some research, we are a long small twig on the family tree on that side. I have one brother. My Dad was an only child. He had 5 aunts and uncles, he had two cousins. Neither had children. His Dad doesn't show in the Social Security Death Index in the times I have checked it. We know that the surname was Gillett until about 1840 or so when due to a business decision, the sign was painted Gillette or the something was done spelled Gillette and it was cheaper to keep the new spelling (Sounds Scots to me). He traced back to Ross & Cromartie His Father was one of the youngest siblings and he was about 45 or a little older when my Dad Was born, His GrandFather was about that age when his Father was born and his GreatGrandfather who lived to 104 was at least that age when his Granddad was born. so some pretty long sticks on the branch.

My Mother's Aunt completed her DAR research so we have a good start there, 13 generations in New England. Looks like they moved a little faster on that side. One of her Grandfathers came from County Cork. We also have some Iroquois on her side, she remembers meeting some Iroquois cousins surnamed hauk when she was little in Connecticut.

I have a cousin on my Mothers side who was married to a Mormon for a while. So they may have plugged the DAR stuff in to their system (if we're lucky).

So while we aren't starting at ground zero , we're not too far away.

Hello SeaDog
I did a quick Google search on the names Gilette and Gillett... both would appear to be of English origins - based in the West Country. That is not to say that your ancestor did not originate from Scotland, just that the name appears to be originally English..... there are lots of names which are common in Scotland today which are not Scots in origin. Lots of Norman names like Fraser (don't get much more Scots than that) were originally French! Gillette sounds like a franco-British name - but I am not sure about Gillett.

This genforum site might be of interest to you.
http://genforum.genealogy.com/gillett/?pri...riority=0000900

I've met English, French and Mexican Gillettes. Scots and English Gilletts. The Mexican said his Father was half French and Mexican and his Mother was all Mexican. We had an interesting chat at Italian Jewish Deli sandwich shop in North Hollywood. SoCal is definitely a melting pot.

Based on my limited conversations with other Gillettes. The trailing E tends to be French and alledgedly Norman English. Gillett tends to be Northern English. We do have Gillett letters and a few other papers from Scotland before they emigrated to Ontario in the 1840's or so. (Mother has them now so I can't be real specific on dates and cities without them in hand.) They theoretically are a diminutive based on Gill or Gil, and my Dads mother was a Gilchrist again the Gil related Surname. The last time I talked with an on line Gillette (alledgedly not trying to get me to buy into anything) also knowing that they weren't going to be too directly related. They seemed a little stuffy about things, and were pushing the French side. They were pumping me for any information "so I could be included in the books they were publishing", I mentioned that I had found a Frederick Gillette who had been arrested by the famous Wells Fargo Detective Oliver Hume for robbing the Darwin-Independence Stage in Eastern CA and had done time in Folsom. They never contacted me again.

We're going to be getting a program and start getting it down and collected in one place to start. The wife has been getting a lot of contacts and help on her side of the family. She's filled some holes for some folks and found several once or twice removed cousins that are also doing family trees so we've got some "coaches" available.

Well I must admit my frustration! For the past two weeks I have been working fervently on a certain great-grandmother and every time I just about get where I think I am going to get somewhere it directs me to Ancestry.com and places where I have to pay for additional information! Rats! I already pay for genealogy.com and I get nothing from them and when I just about do, they do the same thing, refer me to sites that require that I pay out more money! I am really upset about this. do you all encounter this? Or am I just being too impatient. I have checked out every site on our favorite web sites and I get the same blasted thing! Somebody told me that if I wanted information on my family that I was going to have to be willing to pay for it and a lot........bull! I am too cheap and stubborn for that!

Interested in your experiences.

Hang in there, CR! It's gotta get better! I found a very distant cousin last week on rootsweb. We had the same great, great, great, grandfather. Maybe some paid sites are better than others?

Rosemary, I said this from the beginning. Genealogy can be very frustrating at times. All you can do is get your information out there on every site that will accept it and sit back and wait for someone to recognize it.
Your doing the same thing, checking everyone elses postings and seeing if they match up. There's new postings on pretty much every web page every day. You just need to get in the habit of going in and check them out. You pick up a piece here and there and it slowly adds up and makes sense.

I have found that the "pay for" sites just aren't worth it. Everything they have is listed SOMEWHERE on the internet, you just need to find it. Most of the time, someone else has bought the CD and was not happy because of the lack of information on it and posted all the information somewhere. They didn't want to see others paying for something that wasn't much help in the first place.

When you get frustrated, pour yourself a glass of wine and go lay on the hammock in the backyard and check out the stars. You have the best and most relaxing view for that.

Thank you Mike! I just needed to vent. Thank you for listening to me. I will do what you suggest! Thank you , thank you! You are a gem!

HI ROSE! AS WINSTON SAID: "NEVER GIVE UP!" OOPS, QUOTING AN ENGLISHMAN. WELL HE WAS SCOTS IN HIS HEART!! YOUR NEXT RELATIVE IS ONLY A "GOOGLE" AWAY! I FOUND A 92 YR OLD COUSIN WHOM I HAD NO IDEA EVEN EXISTED. KEEP ON!!! TETONMAN

I keep trying Tetonman! The problem I am running into is that while the men were always recorded, the women were not and/or their parents.

Stumbled across another relative yesterday on the Shrule.com page. She is from Minnesota. She had signed the guestbook and she happened to mention that she was the g grand daughter of Patrick Egan (my avatar). I e-mailed her but haven't heard from her yet. I'm hoping she can fill in some holes.

Oh wow! Mike! How so very exciting! I wish you very much success with that. Goes to show that persistence pays off, eh?

In the genealogy.com forums, I found two distant cousins on different branches of my great-grandfather's tree who were looking for info on my great-grandfather's family. We traded info and expanded that side of the tree three-fold. Each cousin sent me info they got from different pay sites.

Posting on the forums may pay off.