Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Are Your Major Genealogy Research Challenges?

Randy Seaver is back with this week's challenge (a key word this week) for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  What are your major genealogy challenges — the family mysteries that you haven't been able to crack to date?

2.  Tell us about five of your real genealogy challenges with a short paragraph, and links to blog posts if you have written about them.

3.  Share your challenges in your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack, BlueSky, or other social media post.  Leave a link to your post on this blog post to help us find your post.

Okay, here's my list.

• Who was the biological father of my paternal grandfather, Bertram Lynn Sellers, Sr. (1903–1995)?  He was informally adopted by his mother's husband when he was seven months old and used the name Sellers his entire life.  See "I'm Apparently a Sellers via Informal Adoption" and "Looking for Mr. Mundy (or a variant thereof)."

• What happened to my cousin Raymond Lawrence Sellers (1945–?) after his mother put him up for adoption?  I was unable to find anything about Raymond before my aunt passed away, but her other children would still like to know.  See "Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:  Your 2024 'Dear Genea-Santa' Letter."

• All of my Jewish research is a challenge, but the especially difficult lines are those who were living in what was Grodno gubernia in Russia, now mostly in Belarus.  The Nazis were particularly thorough in destroying archival records about the Jews in the area.  So my Meckler (Mekler), Novitsky (Nowicki), and Yelsky lines I'm really, really stuck on.  See "Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:  Your Best Genealogy Research Find in May 2018."

• And speaking of the Jewish part of my family, I had a few cousins who ended up in Cuba when they fled Eastern Europe.  I have managed to acquire only four records from their time there (which ranged from the late 1920's to the early 1960's).  I don't know if going back to Cuba will help with my research on the Szochermans.  See "A Declaration of Intention — from Cuba."

• My ex's father (and therefore the grandfather of my stepsons), Karm Singh, was from Punjab, India, born when it was still controlled by the British.  The British barely bothered with records for their own people in India; they didn't really care about the Indians.  So I've gotten absolutely nowhere so far on finding any records for the family.  I have been told I would have better luck if I could travel there and talk to people in person.  See "'Finding Your Roots' – Margaret Cho, Sanjay Gupta, and Martha Stewart."