Filling in the Holes

Been an interesting couple of weeks for me. Some serious searching online has brought me knowledge of family members who are still little more than a clump of facts, but I am getting there. I have a feeling it will require a trip to Dubuque and Cedar Rapids physically on my part to get to the root of some of this. I am not certain my grandfather Dean ever even had a birth certificate. Can't seem to find anything online about birth records of any consistency before about 1910.

Oh, and speaking of that- the US Federal Censuses (censi?) need to be combed over very clearly. I have found multiple misspellings of family names, first names, and conflicts in birth years from one decade to the next.
I don't know when they started to do a census, but it took awhile to get even close to perfecting it.

I did have one interesting thing drop into my lap. I work in a joint Tricare/VA medical clinic. I heard a name being fractured by people trying to pronounce, and in the process of trying to get his name right, may have found a whole other family connection. The Guion side of the family (Diddy's grandmother, Josephine, one of the two women she was named for) is something of a mystery. Well, it was anyway. I now may have a connection to the Guion (originally spelled Guyon) family line going back as far as 900 C.E. (current era.) The gentleman says he has a book he will bring to let me see. I hope to track down a copy of same, for my own sake.
Guion is not a common name, and supposedly all the family line can be traced. Now here's a kicker for me: the possible royal lineage of that family line may be finally provable. Herbert gave Diddy reason to believe that the Hopkins/Guion side of the family had royal French blood. I may be able to exonerate him; Diddy's own child never wanted to believe the story, as the facts within it were unprovable.

This has been an interesting month for me. A lot of the holes in my family's history are filling in slowly. On the scale of the time I have invested in this search, it seems to be swift, but it isn't really. What does really blow my mind personally is the potential number of people I have added to the family line, the number of relatives that could be out there, in just a 12th of a year.