Alright, let me tell you about this whole Jeanne Lambert thing I got myself into a while back. It wasn’t some big project or anything, just a personal rabbit hole I fell down one weekend, and it kinda stuck with me.
It started pretty simply. I was digging through some old family papers, you know, the kind stuffed in a box in the attic. Found a really old letter mentioning a ‘Jeanne Lambert’ connected to my great-grandmother’s side. The name just jumped out. Never heard it before. So, I thought, okay, let’s see who this is. A little bit of family history, right? How hard could it be?
Getting Started
First thing, I hit the usual online genealogy sites. Typed in ‘Jeanne Lambert’ and the rough time period from the letter. Boom. Hundreds, maybe thousands of results. France, Canada, Louisiana… everywhere. Okay, maybe harder than I thought. Too broad.
I needed to narrow it down. Went back to the letter. Tried to figure out the location mentioned. Looked like a small village name in France, but the handwriting was terrible. Spent a good hour just trying different spellings of the village name in search engines.
The Process (or lack thereof)
Here’s where the real ‘fun’ began. My ‘practice’ became less about finding Jeanne and more about just deciphering old script and navigating clunky databases.
- I tried cross-referencing the village name with other family names I knew were from that area. Got a few potential matches for the village.
- Then I plugged those village names back into the genealogy sites along with ‘Jeanne Lambert’. Fewer results, but still a mess. Different birth years, different spouse names.
- I started mapping out potential family trees based on the records I found. Lots of drawing lines, crossing things out. Felt like detective work, but mostly led to dead ends.
- Found a record for a Jeanne Lambert marrying someone with a totally unfamiliar last name. Was that her? Did she marry twice? Who knows. The records were sparse.
Hitting a Wall
Honestly, after a few days of poking around in my spare time, I didn’t get much further. Found several Jeanne Lamberts who could have been the one, but nothing definite. No smoking gun. It was frustrating. You think with the internet everything’s easy to find, but old records, especially for ordinary people, are patchy.
It reminded me of this time I tried fixing an old radio. Took the whole thing apart, cleaned every piece, put it back together… silence. Sometimes you put in the effort, follow the steps you think are right, and just don’t get the result you wanted. You just have a pile of parts, or in this case, a list of names that might or might not be your ancestor.
So, the Jeanne Lambert file is still open, so to speak. Sitting in my notes. Maybe I’ll pick it up again someday, maybe not. It was a process, that’s for sure. A practice in patience, if nothing else. Learned more about French geography and old handwriting than I ever expected. But as for Jeanne herself? Still a mystery.
