As a woman of a certain age, I'm quite familiar with advice on keeping your brain sharp. Crosswords, they say.
Well, just lately as Cuzzin Rachel and I try to untangle to supporting lines of our Pearson ancestors, we've had to be plenty creative. For instance, how many ways can one spell "John Staton"? There are John, Jon, possible Jonathans, the archaic abbreviation Jno., and Jack. And the surname has been spelled variously as Stanton, Staten (like the island), Staton, Stayton and Stayden. If we're looking at handwritten documents from the 1700 and early 1800's, "S" is written as "F", and best of luck making out most of the rest.
Trying to use the "Find" feature in lengthy documents or indexes is even more challenging when your many-times great grandfather's surname is "Field." There are a lot of them, too. An old Virginia family, with English names like John and Jane here as well, although they kindly named one son Obadiah.
The other place where we essentially have to play something akin to paper Jenga is maps or land records. County boundaries changed frequently, forming new counties of (often) two or three pieces from mutliple older counties. With sometimes slim or missing residential information, we have a group of about 7 counties in Kentucky that I look at regularly for the same people.
Who needs crosswords? (With apologies to my crossword partner, you know who you are!)
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