Free Money from Your Ancestors

Knowing your genealogy can actually be worth substantial money to you, and life-changing knowledge can be beyond priceless, truly of incalculable value.

 

For instance, having the knowledge I just discovered could have given a life-changing advantage of monumental value to one of your ancestors, to you, and to your descendants.

 

In fact, if one of your ancestors had discovered this key knowledge when they really needed it, you and your descendants would have been born into an entirely different and almost certainly much better socio-economic environment.

 

And you or one of your descendants may be standing at that very crossroads right now.

 

The amazing Google Book Search was the source of one key piece of knowledge that led me to the pleasing discovery that the Family Forest® contains an additional treasure trove of priceless knowledge that I was unaware of. 

 

This particular gem of knowledge was found in a book that has been in the Harvard College Library for over a century. This book is number 299 of a 300 edition printing of a 1905 genealogy book about the Kingsbury family. A sticker in the front of the book says:

 

“From the Bright Legacy. Descendants of Henry Bright, jr., who died at Watertown, Mass., in 1686, are entitled to hold scholarship in Harvard College, established in 1880 under the will of Jonathan Brown Bright of Waltham, Mass., with one half the income of this Legacy. Such descendants failing, other persons are eligible to the scholarships. The will requires that this announcement shall be made in every book added to the Library under its provisions.”

 

So a couple of quick mouse-clicks in the Family Forest® New World Edition

revealed that Henry Bright, Jr. had descendants with the surnames of Abbott, Adams, Ahrens, Alexander, Atkins, Baker, Baldwin, Barnes, Bentley, Bicknell, Bigelow, Bond, Booth, Bowman, Bright, Bryant, Brown, Burkholder, Carder, Carter, Chamberlin, Cheesman, Clark, Coffin, Cooledge, Coolidge, Crane, Cunningham, Cummings, Dalton, Dean, Deane, Dvojacki, Dewey, Dexter, Folsom, Fowle, Frary, Fuller, Gates, Gibson, Gilman, Goddard, Goodloe, Gould, Greenleaf, Greenwood, Grosvenor, Hanna, Harpole, Hastings, Higgins, Homans, Howell, Jackson, Kiblinger, Langan, Learned, Leavitt, Lipphart, Little, Livermore, Martin, Merriam, Miles, Miller, Mills, Morgan, Munroe, Niebell, Owsley, Paddock, Page, Passarella, Pearce, Perkins, Pleasants, Pratt, Pulsifer, Quincy, Ray, Raymond, Rentschler, Rice, Rodger, Rowland, Sargent, Shattuck, Shreve, Smallwood, Smith, Skillen, Stearns, Stetson, Stocker, Stone, Storer, Stratton, Strecker, Sweeney, Tatnall, Taylor, Temple, Tileston, Tufts, Walker, Waller, Washburn, Webber, Webster, Welch, Wheeler, White, Whiting, Wier, Wigglesworth, Woods, Woodward, and others.

 

One of these is the surname of a friend who was struggling last fall to find funds to give his daughter a good college education. A couple of them are names of members of my church congregation, one is one of Kristine’s ancestors, four are some of my ancestral surnames, and some are names and/or ancestral surnames of people we see regularly in the news.

 

How many people who are entitled to basically free money from their ancestors are completely unaware of it? How many people with unusual surnames such as Ahrens, Dvojacki, or Passarella, or common surnames such as Baker, Clark, or Smith, would know that they had ancestors with the surname of Bright, and that this knowledge can entitle members of their family to a life-changing advantage?

 

Which of course leads me back to the Family Forest®. If key knowledge can be priceless, what is a digital edutainment resource that leads you to that knowledge worth?