Amelia White was, like Isaiah Wright, easy to trace. Her family had already been well-researched back to a man named Kilbourn who was born in about 1494! This full genealogy was available in the Internet and I quickly gobbled it up.

Now I had two very long family lines and I needed a way to organize all the people, their dates of birth, marriage and death, and their relationships. I selected the Personal Ancestry File (PAF) and downloaded it for free from the Mormon's (Church of the Latter Day Saints) website. Once installed, it took me several long sessions to enter all the data I had into the program's database. The genealogies and gedcom files available on this site have all been produced by that program.

But back to David Milks. I couldn't find anything on his ancestry and I was looking everywhere. One lucky evening in March, 2003, I came across a "memo" attached to one record of a David Milks (b. 1786) in Rensselaer, N.Y. that I came across in a search of the Rootsweb Internet site. This memo was in an icon that looked exactly like a "Post-it Note" tacked to the page about this David Milks.

I clicked on the icon and it took me to a message from Marlene H. in British Columbia saying that she had evidence of this David Milks (b. 1786) being in Kitley Township in the 1820's with his wife Martha Ireland and family. I e-mailed her asking whether my David Milks (b. 1807) was in that family. Marlene responded quickly (people are really helpful that way) saying that she was researching Martha Ireland when she came upon her David Milks' family. Unfortunately, Marlene told me that Martha Ireland had died in 1824, that two children (girls) of David Milks had died and that David had remarried and raised a second family. There was no information about a son named David (b. 1807).

Then, I had my third remarkable piece of good fortune. Marlene referred me to the person who had been helping her to find Ireland family members in Leeds & Grenville. This person was Sandy Wunder, who lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, of all places. Sandy took me under her wing and began mentoring me about how to do this research in an organized way. Suddenly, I had the benefit of learning from someone who had been doing genealogical research on her husband's family in eastern Ontario for 20 years or more.