I needed a vacation. (A professional genealogist's definition of vacation is "working on my own family.") I picked a family that I hadn't worked on in about fifteen years. I didn't expect to find new ancestors, although I hoped for leads on one of the wives. This family had been "done" decades ago. THE BOOK was typical. It had a coat of arms, twenty-eight generations of probably fanciful European origins, and no documentation. However, it seemed fairly accurate when it came to American descendants. Nothing I had found in the course of correspondence or in records I had encountered thus far contradicted the lineages in THE BOOK.

But I had found some minor inconsistencies that bothered me, often related to chronology. For example, THE BOOK said my ancestor John moved in 1765, but I had found a record showing he had acquired land in the new locality in 1744. In fact, there were several persons of the surname who came into general area much earlier and who weren't accounted for in THE BOOK...