Do you remember the days of the SASE, putting one in a letter and then waiting for it to come back to you? (SASE: Self addressed stamped envelope) Well, even though I didn’t receive a SASE in the mail, I did receive a bounty of genealogy documents in the mail recently!

One package was from the Frankfort Community Public Library in Clinton County, Indiana and contained photocopies of probate records for my Ricketts/Reed family.

The other package was a thumb drive from Brad Quinlan. In June, he posted in the Facebook group, Descendants of Andersonville Prison, that he was making a trip to Washington, D.C. to do research and had time to take on more clients during that trip. Even though I had already requested the military and pension files for my civil war ancestors from the national archives, I did not know at the time about requesting the ENTIRE file. Not knowing what I might be missing, I elected to inquire about whether he had time to fulfill my requests. He did have time to take on my requests and a thumb drive arrived recently containing the images obtained from those files.

In both cases, there was an exchange of money. However, what I spent obtaining the records was a small percentage of what it would cost to pay travel expenses for me to obtain them myself.

I am thankful to have these records. Now, I have lots of work to do to get these transcribed!

• Probate Record for John Ricketts (2MTW-355)
• Partition file for John Ricketts’ estate
• Probate record for Mary Reed (KLVH-CFM)
• Military file for George Mentzer (LHKS-17Q)
• Pension file for George Mentzer
• Military file for James M. Ricketts (KV21-XBR)
• Pension file for James M. Ricketts
• Military file for Noah Briles (K2Q1-RG9)
• Pension file for Noah Briles
• Military files (3 of them) for Richmond F. Hammond (2B2M-GXK)
• Pension file for Richmond F. Hammond
• Military file for Washington Marion Crawford (KHFD-XRW)
• Pension file for Washington Marion Crawford