Family History Miracle

This semester I'm taking a Beginner's Family History Class in Institute.  It's pretty fun because our teacher will share an easy tip and then set us loose to do whatever family history work we want.  I was able to do a few things, but then was stuck.  I've been looking at Mom's side because Dad's is almost totally done (though I did find a whole line of Pidds that hadn't had their work done) and I can't really find my way back further than what was already in there.

Well, when I went to Idaho Falls for Labor Day I snagged my pedigree chart and a few stories that were in my mission stuff.  The mission list said I needed to bring some family history stories and I never used them, but hung on to them.  So I've had these few things the whole month of September, kept in my school folder with my syllabuses etc in case I needed them for my family history class.

Last Tuesday when I was almost done with work I was looking through my folder and started reading one of the stories.  It's a news article about George Hicks (mom's great-great-grandfather) and how he helped settle a place in Illinois.  If you can believe it, this article has the names of his wife, all of his children, who his children married, some of the names of their children, where they lived, it has the name of his second wife who he married after his first wife died, who was also widowed and has the name of her first spouse and kids.  All together it has the names of at least 35 people.  And MOST of those are not already in family search.

It's a miracle!  So I've been going crazy the past few days, in a family history frenzy, just trying to add all of these people and trying to find their kids' kids, locating the censuses and marriage documents in family search, finding their headstones in findagrave.com (my new favorite website).  It has been really cool!  And it's a lot easier to find information coming forward from George Hicks than it was trying to go backwards.  So much to do!