Warren Azro Washburn was my 3rd great grandfather and a couple of years ago, I started out my research looking for his parents as he was the only 3rd great grandparent that I didn't have parents names for. (All the genealogical info I had had come from others.) I thought it would be easy but it wasn't (Which is probably why I didn't have the names in the first place.)
After about a year, I did find the names of his parents (Leonard F Washburn and Arvilla Nutting) but finding any more Washburn ancestors on the internet had seemingly come to a dead end. There were 2 competing pedigree charts on Ancestry.com for Leonard but I didn't know which was correct. Short of taking a trip to Vermont where they were from and digging into records there, I didn't know what to do.
Then one day, I did one more Google search on the Washburn family names and this
link came up which I hadn't seen before. It was a book scanned by Google as part of their project to scan old books in libraries (this one was in the library of the University of Wisconsin of all places.) The book is called
Washburn: A Partial History of the family from the arrival of John Washburn about 1632 ... and it was written by none other than my 3rd great grandfather
Warren Azro Washburn! The book is loaded with genealogical information on his family and gave me the names of his grandparents and many others in the Washburn line going back to when Washburns first came to America.
Needless to say, I was stunned. I could hardly believe that I had found it. I truly believe that when all doors seem closed, that's when God will be there to open one to let one's research continue.
