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06 May 2010

My Name is Sue...

I'm sure many of you remember that song, My Name is Sue.. It brings to mind an incident Tuesday when I was working on some research at the Allen County Public Library.

While flipping thru a book I happened to spot the name Jimmerson. Not a surname, but a given name. Now my memory is just good enough that when I have some strange names I do happen to remember them. In fact, Anne over at Gene Notes collects strange names. Every time the Wild Ones find a strange name we hand it over to Anne for her collection. Maybe one day she'll blog about her collection & share some with you.

Back to Jimmerson, I don't see it very often so I quickly jumped into my data base and did a "name" search. Notice I didn't say surname search. I found ONE Jimmerson in my file. Problem was I had to go back and find that Jimmerson in the index again. In thumbing thru the pages got away from me. SO I went back and thumbed through until I located the entry again. Turns out he was the very same one in my data base! Not in the county I expected, but hey, he is not lost any more!

Comes down to searching for those strange names - the ones we don't see all the time - sometimes that gets us much further than searching for surnames. Works for me!

4 comments:

Carol said...

Sounds like another terrific reseach day. WAHOO

M. Diane Rogers said...

What a lucky find! And good follow up! Congrats.
And I too hope Anne will write about her collection of 'strange' given names.

Anne Percival Kruszka said...

I think I did blog about names!

Tracy said...

I, too, thought Jimmerson was a rather unusual name, but not perhaps not as much as I thought.

I received a comment on one of my posts a while back that indicated a Jimmerson Woody served in the same Confederate unit as my ancestor, William Woody. They were both from the same area and are very likely cousins of some sort....I haven't figured that out yet. And considering this family used many of the same names over and over again, Jimmerson just stands out.