Yeah, I think I was able to find my grandparents easily because their names were unique. Trying to find my "father", who may not even be dead yet, is more difficult. I just keep checking every few years.

6:30AM call. I hate the world.

My grandfathers father is John Taylor. I can't follow that line at all. I was able to find the man I think was my father, but it was complete luck. I was looking through a directory, and found him as the head contact for the business my mother worked for, and it matched the name she gave me. She told me he died before I was born, but his death date actually lined up with the time when I was in second grade when she sat me down to tell me about him and I flipped out like a mammal. She got mad and told me that she would never tell me anything about him again, and she never did! I flipped out again surrounding the FAFSA, and that's when she told me he was dead.

And we will clearly not get through everything in this meeting, which means we'll have to have another one.

I am taking a different bus this morning and it just announced the Hamilton stop! It made me happy

I have line where there are John Smiths. Luckily we have some independent records so I already know birth and death dates. I am totally stumped by a Nathaniel Watson and William Hill in another line though. (Zadok and Melancthon Wheeler, otoh, easy peasy.)

I just looked, and I actually get lost at the great-great-great grandpa level- there is John Irving Taylor son of John Ogden Taylor, son of John L. Taylor, and John L Taylor is where I get lost!

The problem in my family is more often each person spelling their own name differently (or using a completely different name) on every document than common names, although there is some of that also. And that's not even the Russians with their four or five interchangeable names each, guessing at the spelling in another alphabet. At least the patronyms are informative with them.

I am greatly aided in my genealogy by a lot of my lines going back to very early colonial Massachusetts. Those people are very well documented (I guess Puritan churches kept great records), and a lot of people have already done all the work in the 19th century when everyone was all romantic about Pilgrims.

I think I just need to a) pay for international Ancestry.com or b) find some free resources for Scotland/England.