Breakthrough!

Finally!  After over 5 years of researching, I finally found records for my great-grandmother, Mary Tee OAKLEY!

Mistress Mary has been quite the contrary genealogical hermit over the years.  I've looked in so many places, but there is something you have to understand about all of this.  The surname OAKLEY is rampant in Person County, NC, which is the county where I live, and where many of my CHAMBERS ancestors were residing.  You see, Mary Tee OAKLEY married into the CHAMBERS family of Person County, and lived a large part of her life there as well.  My dilemma was that I had nothing to go by other than her name and the family she married into.  As common as the name Mary is in... well... every town, the name OAKLEY is extremely common in the area where she lived, so it was difficult to know just who she belonged to before she married the CHAMBERS.

Thanks to my mother, I had a second married name and rough estimate of the year of her death, which I promptly added to Mary's profile on my ancestry.com tree.  For a long time this turned up nothing.  But suddenly, with an exciting development of my acquiring a 14-day free trial, I got a chance to look again.  Lo and behold, there sat a quivering leaf on Ms. Mary.  Imagine my joy to discover that there was a death certificate I'd never seen before!  I now have parents for Mary, as well as a location of her burial and the name of the funeral home where she'd been prepared for burial.

It's not a large amount of information, but it is a start!  From this information I will be able to find census records and many other things that will help me discover who my OAKLEY ancestors were. :-)  A whole new world of possibilities just opened up!