This trip home, I was able to meet up with a recently found Raifsnider cousin! Thanks to my blog, we started emailing a few months ago and we were finally able to meet up when I made the trip back for the holidays. Her parents were both avid genealogists and they had quite a bit of information on the Raifsnider side of the family including this amazing gem:

486 Benjamin Raifsnider

Benjamin Raifsnider happens to be her 2x great-grandfather and brother to my 2x great-grandfather Hezekiah Raifsnider. That makes us 4th cousins. However, she isn’t sure if this is her 2x great-grandfather OR Benjamin and Hezekiah’s father – also named Benjamin (of course). So I’m going to do some sleuthing with this picture to figure out a time frame of when it was taken. I love new projects 🙂

I have no pictures of Hezekiah and only knew of this brother because Hezekiah lived with him at one point during a census. Now, however, I have a slew of names of possible brothers and sisters! I am very excited to see where this new information takes me.

GENEALOGY NEWS!

Here are some news-worthy items in the genealogy world:

  • Holiday Sale from Genealogical.com! – all of Elizabeth Shown Mills’ titles are on sale right now! So scoop up a copy of Evidence Explained and Professional Genealogy!
  • Geneabloggers also listed a ton of sales that are new today and ongoing! RootsMagic 7 is also on sale (that’s the program I use). Check it out!
  • Geneabloggers is also beginning a Genealogy-Do-Over that starts Jan 2nd! Thomas MacEntee from Geneabloggers is starting over from scratch because let’s face it – in the beginning how many of us actually wrote down where our information came from? Or just copied and pasted someone else’s tree without checking the facts? How many times have we needed to re-find something because of these errors only to find out we had something wrong? Well this is hopefully going to fix that and he has prompts/tips/roadmaps for those who wish to join him. It sounds like something I may also participate in too!

Happy Friday!