N not R!

Several ago,  my brother-in-law, one of those dangerous people who having tasted a little of something think themselves the all knowing experts on the subject of this something, attempted to persuade me that some website company would perform genealogical research free of charge for anyone who asked.   I was at the time beginning to become interested in the genealogy of my family having stumbled by accident on a sketchy genealogical chart which included my father and grandfather and was published online by a hobbyist professor at a San Diego, California university.

My brother-in-law convinced himself that the company behind this website would endeavor to fill for us in the holes in my chart and more, and ignoring my protests fed it information about me and my family.  Free of charge. To the website, needless to say!  Which was the point of this suckers' game.  The website, one of many such enterprises, started out collecting information from gullible internauts, only to begin selling it back to them and others once it built its database. Voila!   Neither my brother-in-law nor I have learned anything we hadn't known before.

Meanwhile, I continued my research, all of it on Internet as I reside far from the places where some physical records might still exist that haven't yet been digitized and published on the web.  My parents didn't leave behind much information about their parents and grandparents, and who can blame them - living as they were through tumultuous times they had better matters to worry about than vanity projects like genealogy.

It's been as I said several years. I haven't found much new information, nothing about my mother's side of family, and just a few details about my father's family to supplement the San Diego professor's chart.  My father's mother remains a mystery.  She died when he was young, 9 years old I only recently discovered,  and where she's buried I don't know. His father apparently remarried,  of this second wife I know nothing.   While the San Diego chart shows my grandfather's ancestors all the way back to the beginning of the 18th century,  when it comes to my  grandmother it only states her name and birthplace.

The other day a breakthrough of sorts.  I dug up on one of the genealogical portals the names of my paternal grandmother, her parents and her two sisters.  The records were added in July of this year by a man whose name sounds unfamiliar, and who, according to this portal, maintains 100 profiles there. Another hobbyist?  While the portal promises additional information for the sum of $119.40 per annum (0.40?!),  (and predictably demands your family information when you sign up for the limited free option),  it also displays large font question marks next to most of those details it offers me for free.  In other words,  they ain't got nothing more!

Oh, and in my grandmother's maiden name the 'r' in the San Diego chart is replaced by an 'n' in this new finding.

I took this correction to be correct, but it didn't lead me anywhere. I spent another fruitless day searching the web for new clues, and ended up reminding myself that for information to appear somewhere on the net where it can be found, someone, a live person, has to have a reason to place it there, and then to act on this reason. The search continues.