Don’t Forget they Lived it

I discovered that an ancestor of mine died in 1837 when he had barely been married five years, leaving behind a wife and three children. This obviously caused a big change in the life of his wife and children. Did his widow move back to the nearby village where she was from? Did she continue to live in the village where she had her now late husband had moved to shortly after their marriage? Did she marry again and have more children?

Ancestral discoveries are made about real people who lived out the events in real time. We may focus on the record on paper but our ancestor was focused on how that event was going to impact their life.