James Cullimore (1898-1868) and Benjamin Nelson Graham (1828-1885)

Oh how frustrating it is to see so many people on Ancestry.com that have my greatx3 grandfather James listed as the James Cullimore of Utah. Don't remember seeing anywhere that he was a Mormon, nor that he lived in Utah and had a wife named Clara Fowlke.  And, to see people listing my greatx2 grandfather Benjamin as living, dying and being buried in California.  I try to email them and tell them of their errors, with little success.  Check your resources people before you add to your Ancestry.com tree.

John and Suzanna Kate (Cullimore) Flanagin

Don't really know why I've become obsessed with finding the parents of John W. Cullimore's sister's husband. Because it is a mystery? Because a great grandson has emailed me asking for any information I have on Suzanna?  What I do find interesting is that there are two sets of John and Suzanna Flanagins in the Ancestry.com databases and member created trees. And, within Ancestry.com people have these two intertwined within their trees. Suzanna Kate Cullimore's husband John Flanagin didn't not live, die, nor was he buried in Pawnee,Nebraska in 1905. Her husband live to around 1930. There seems to be two James Flanagin's that people are claiming to be the father of her husband. Both have different birth and death dates. I'm inclined to believe if one of these is his father that it would be the one born in 1811.  But as of this date I have no proof of who his father was.  Then there is the spelling of the last name. I'm sure that contributes to all the confusion...Flanagin (Suzanna's husband's spelling), Flanagan and Flanigan. Of course one could say that his family may have changed the spelling along the course of time.

Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names.  At some point the search becomes futile... there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago.  All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks.  What will it be?  A photograph?  A will?  A fragment of a letter?  The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he find the object he never knew he was looking for.  ~Henry Wiencek