Sponagle... Sponagel.... Spannagel?

However you spell it, we've got them!

The weird thing is I had this information sitting on my digital desktop for a couple of weeks. What I have is a listing of anyone named Sponagle that was recorded in one of 33 sources contributing to the Lunenburg Vital Records.* 

All I knew, as of 9:00 this morning, is that Mary Ann Sponagle was born on 16 July 1795 in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, had married William Park Drew on 19 January 1820, and that she died with a will in 1880. I found their marriage record - really more of a contract - through Ancestry.com and the Nova Scotia Historical Vital Statistics Online Service. The thing that was puzzling me is William Park Drew and Philip Sponagle signed the contract, rather than William and Mary Ann Sponagle.

Just seemed odd to me.

I assumed that Philip would be her father or possibly brother, if her father had died.  I put Philip in the space Mary Ann's father would go. Unfortunately the dates didn't match up, so I deleted him from the record, and decided to put him in as her brother because the dates indicated he could be that. For some reason, you can't add siblings unless you have a parent listed. I wonder why that is?

A quick search of Ancestry.com turned up no records that matched his dates. Phooey! So I tried out my favorite new trick when I come to a dead end...

It's located in the lower right hand corner of a profile page > Recent Member Connect Activity - it might say you have not connected with other Ancestry members researching XXX yet. Learn more.

DO IT! - click on the Learn more button.

A new page appears with a list of people who are also searching for the same or similar information. It shows what they are looking for and while they may not have the information yet, they might have found other information you could use...like parents, siblings, children etc. Except there wasn't any Sponagle information that I didn't already know.

The eureka! moment today was when I clicked on a link located in the box below the recent member box called search the web ..., and voila, Neil Sponagle has a website. That looked very promising. And it was!

We've got lots of Sponagles now! And it is only 10:35am. And, yes, I did go back to my listing of Lunenburg Vital Records to verify the information.

It's a good Sponagle day!

* Lunenburg Vital Records can be accessed through: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~canns/lunenburg/index.html


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