I'm BAAAAAAACK.....

It's been a long time.  As in LOOOOOOOONG time.

And I can't say exactly *why* I'm back, other than the fact that I've felt impressed recently to begin again documenting the discoveries I come across while researching my lovely ancestors.  For a family historian with a fictitious maiden name and a father who just wouldn't talk about his ancestors, I'm constantly amazed at the information, connections, and experiences that have fallen in my lap over the years--particularly in the last 7 or 8 years.  I don't believe in coincidences--I know they are gifts from a loving Heavenly Father for which I am beyond grateful.

So this is a new beginning of sorts.  Especially since these newest discoveries pertain to Mother's family and not Daddy's.  I've been obsessed with my Dad's Hardy/Bower/Bridgarts for so long now and have shamefully neglected Mother's Shutt and Robbins folk.  I've just been assuming that those two lines are fairly well documented and that they wouldn't require a whole lot of work.

Yeah, some of them are well documented, all right, but geez-o-pete there are some doozies out there that I either forgot about or never knew about in the first place.

This week is a classic example.  First, it was finding Abraham Lincoln on the same burial register as some of my Shutts in Springfield, Illinois.  Tonight it's a little obituary I just randomly picked out of Colonel's papers about his mother.  It seems that Mary Duffield Moore Shutt was the grand-daughter of Thomas Rutherford, foreman of the grand jury that indicted abolitionist John Brown after his ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, one of the most important events that set the stage for the Civil War.  

Holy Cow......

Here is Mary Duffield Moore Shutt in an undated photograph.  

I cannot WAIT for the next "Holy Cow" moment.....