I love research

Maybe it's 'cause my dad loved reading mysteries. Maybe it's 'cause my mom was an avid reader and took us to museums and libraries all the time.  But, I LOVE RESEARCH.  I love digging around in dusty old archives and finding out stuff that nobody else knows.  Not a lot of people have this personality trait.  They enjoy hearing the results of somebody's research, the interesting gossip of folks long dead, but they don't like rolling up their sleeves and getting into it.

I have had a blast researching the John de Saulles case.  Thank God for Google!!  I've been doing genealogy as a hobby for about 25 years, and what a difference the internet makes.  It used to be I'd drive to the local Mormon library, squint at hardback books of printed indexes or microfiche, then if I was lucky enough to find a clue, I'd order a microfilm from the underground vaults in Salt Lake City.  I'm not kidding, there are really underground vaults.

Once I got bit by the curiosity bug, it wasn't hard to go through the basic steps.  Old newspapers digitized online. Federal census. Vital documents, marriages and birth certs and death notices. Good ol' Ancestry.com gave me access to cool stuff like scanned passports and U.K. port manifests.  Ellis Island has a free database of all travelers from the 1890s through the 1950s. Published local histories are getting scanned into Google ebooks by the truckload.  Rootsweb put me in touch with descendants of cousins who, sadly, know less than I do about ol' Jack. Blanca's home town in Chile has a website now, with a heritage association, a historical magazine, and online archives!  Oh boy!  Reference librarians at historical societies and a couple of universities have been awesome.

Gleefully exhausting all the usual sources, I am now getting creative. Again, thanks to Google ebooks (snippet view) I discovered that a guy wrote a cookbook about New Orleans cuisine, and to be unique, he included profiles of some of the well known historic houses.  Guess who I found?  Yes... Jack's grandfather Louis de Saulles had a plantation mansion, and it's still there!  From the "acknowledgments" in the cookbook, I got the exact name of the historical society that was the source, and from their website I got the exact reference to the obituary.  I put a $6 check in the mail today, and I can't wait to get the obit of Louis de Saulles.  One more piece of the puzzle.

I love research.