D is for Dresback

So in the idea of continuing to catch everyone up on my life, I am trying to let everyone know about my recent obsessions.  As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, finding out about my family history is very important.  We believe that families should be connected as it says in the Old Testament (see Malachi 4:6). So one day, I got on familysearch.org which is the LDS version of ancestry.com.  It is free and open to everyone.  I can put myself in and my whole family.  I started looking for someone we didn't know anything about. My aunt and grandmother have done a lot to add to what we know about our family.

In my looking around, I found my fourth-great grandparents--Jacob Dresback and his wife Catherine Hoy. (Hence D is for Dresback) They had a daughter named Olive along with my third-great grandmother.  All we knew was that Olive was born in 1840.  We didn't know anything else about her.  So she became my focus.  As I started looking for her, it expanded into a huge Dresback family search (which is sometimes spelled Dresbach).  I found a lot of Olive's brothers and sisters--and their spouses and their children.

Eventually I got a trial period of ancestry.com to figure out what that had.  I love how it is set up with the collaboration.  Both FamilySearch and Ancestry have great advantages. Through Ancestry I started to add details to their lives--where they lived when etc.  This is a great advantage to Ancestry.  FamilySearch is great in that I don't usually have to approve hints--if the person is in the system they just come with their links.

It was a bittersweet day when I finally found Olive.  Through ancestry's find a grave connections, I figured out that she died after she was only a year or so old.  It was great to finally find her--my inspiration for this mission.  But I was sad to find out that she died so quickly.  I had kind of guessed that as I learned more about the family overall, but I had been hoping I was wrong.  She never had the chance to have a full life. But now she has a connection to someone--and I really do want to make a trip to Ohio someday and visit her grave.