Old Personal Phone Books/John's BreakThrough Dance

Just a quick message about the most valuable resource in my genealogy so
far. Somehow someway I managed to copy a couple of pages out of an old
phonebook that my mom used to use. The copying took place way before I
was seriously interested in genealogy and I promptly put them in with a
very tall stack of papers in my "save" section of multiple other stacks
of papers. Well one day many years after, but during my new found love
for genealogy (just about 12 months ago) I found that paper and boy was
I surprised. Here in my own handwriting was the answer to my brickwall.
A phone number to a person that my aunt had told me to contact because
they were related to my maternal Grandmother who I didn't even know what
her real name was. I called that person and got enough information to
find my Grandmother's baptism certificate and then a few generations
more back. Then on those pages from the phone book I found another
branch of my maternal Grandfathers family effectively increasing that
side of the family at least 100% and maybe upward of 200-300%.

Aside from old personal phone books I have spent a lot of time with just
regular phone books. If your spanish is not so good just start with the
border cities in the US and call all the people in those towns (El Paso,
Calexico, San Diego, many others) with the surnames you are hunting for.
Just tell them right off what you're doing something like: "I'm a
genealogist and I share the same surname as you do. My 'Puentes' come
from Jalisco Mexico and I was wondering if your 'Puentes' line also came
from Mexico? etc. etc. etc." I've managed to find several lost branches
of the family with that technique and it also works when calling mexico
even though I needed to find a good calling card that gives lots of
minutes for Mexico.

I guess I said all that to say that yes I have many times felt something
very similar to feeling the way John Robles has felt in finding
breakthroughs. I describe it as my heart do physical backflips.