So it all started very innocently the other night, after I read in Walter Trout’s biography, that he was from Ocean City, NJ. Hey, I said to my wife, “I may be related to Walter Trout since I did have Trout relatives that lived in Atlantic City”. My Trout-Corson line goes back to the early 1800’s in the Cape May and Atlantic County area!! Anyway, my wife said that I should check out Genealogy Bank for recent obituaries. That started it – I went and looked at some obituaries and didn’t see anything and then I decided to put in the search John Trout who was my last known ancestor t o live in that area. What popped up was this article from 1863! 
Now this John Trout is my great-great grandfather Mark Trout’s brother. Well at least I think it is – my John Trout was listed as a Pilot in the 1860 census, and since there were no planes to pilot a steamboat would seem to be what he piloted.He also left two sons when he died in the same year and month as this article!! So I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that he is Mark’s brother!! Anyway, the point is it does help bring my ancestor to life – well not to life in this case, but at least a real person, who left a wife and two sons! After this find, I went on to put a variety of other names in to the Genealogy Bank search engine and I found quite a bit of new information, marriages, some deaths and otherwise interesting stuff. One of the names I put in was my maternal grandmother’s name Regars. What came up surprised me! Several newspaper articles came up about my grandmother Elva Regars It appears that she was very active in the Junior League of the Union Methodist Episcopal Church in Burlington. Here, an eleven year old Alva (Elva) is part of the musical Christmas entertainment at the Church on New Years Day! This is the same grandmother that I have memories of her giving me a sip of her beer as we sat in the dining area of the Bar on Broad Street in Beverly and the many times we had to pick her up at the Happy Bar in Beverly….. I always say it was the McCloskey’s that did in the Ashton’s!! 
Finally their was an article about a distant relative young eleven year old, Elmer Campbell {named after my 3rd great-grandfather) who had this experience……… 
I know it’s hard to read but the gist of the story is that young eleven year old Elmer was playing with his electric trains with a tumbler of auto antifreeze next to him, when he picked up one of the cars a spark ignited the fumes over the antifreeze sending flames over his clothes. At the hospital he was in serious but not critical condition! Anyway these articles and several others helped to bring my ancestors and relatives alive! In just the few hours that I’ve spent on-line, I can see that Ancestry.com, Genealogy Bank and Family Search have more databases on-line, than the last time I’ve worked on my family tree, so I guess in 2014 I have to really explore those databases and see if I can find some of my ancestors that I say were in the “Witness Protection Program” – LOL!! read more
