Is a visit to a cemetery in your summer plans? If so, I have a few tips to share after my recent experience. As part of Memorial Day weekend, I wanted to visit the cemetery in Preston, Idaho, where my mother-in-law’s ancestors are buried. With her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents all laid to rest in the same cemetery, I thought it would be a quick and easy thing to locate them. We quickly learned that there was more to it than arriving at the cemetery and walking around. After reflecting on our experience, I thought of three tips to make...
DNA Day is coming up on Sunday, 25 April 2021. This day celebrates the anniversary of the Human Genome Project completion and the day the journal article was published by Watson and Crick that described the structure of DNA. Find a list of some fun and educational activities and resources to learn more about DNA on the CDC Genomics and Precision Health web page https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/events/dna_day.htm The DNA Day Escape Room Challenge looks like fun! The National Human Genome Research Institute has another list of activities. https://www.genome.gov/dna-day/events https://www.genome.gov/dna-day/get-activity-ideas Find more activities to celebrate DNA Day: https://www.genome.gov/dna-day/celebrate Some of my...
Do you have a family story to tell? One that depicts a transformative era in an ancestor’s life or maybe a simple story of connection? You may be at a loss, not knowing where to begin. In Annette Gendler’s book, How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History, you will learn techniques to start you on the path of writing your own family stories. We are reading How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History as our spring Family Locket Book Club selection on Goodreads. After reading various family history books, maybe it’s time to write something of our own! The...
Do you have a goal to write a family history of an ancestor? Does the project seem overwhelming? If so, you can draw hope from today’s guest blog post. Lorna Gorringe Coombs shares the challenges and the triumphs she experienced in collecting and writing family stories of her grandmother. She overcame technology issues and a lack of starting material to produce a book complete with narrative, citations, and pictures. Lorna joined our Research Like a Pro Course to learn the process that would ultimately help her reach her goal. Enjoy her story! Diana By Lorna Gorringe Coombs Lorna Gorringe Coombs...
Have you always wanted to attend RootsTech, but couldn’t travel to Salt Lake City? The silver lining in the worldwide pandemic has been the ability to attend conferences, institutes, and classes virtually. RootsTech is no exception, and to top it off, the conference is free! Typical of RootsTech, this conference will be groundbreaking in its scope. The map below shows the numbers of total registrants – over 300,000 and still growing. Those registrants live in over 200 countries worldwide. A large percentage of those registrants are attending RootsTech for the first time. What makes this conference unique? RootsTechConnect 2021 is...
Are you staring at the facts about your family – gathered from a variety of sources – and wondered how to write this in a fashion someone would actually read? If so, you are not alone. As family historians, we want to leave a legacy, yet turning dry facts into a compelling story is no easy task. Author Carol Baxter provides an example we can learn from in her biography, The Fabulous Flying Mrs. Miller: An Australian’s true story of adventure, danger, romance, and murder. Set in the 1920s and 1930s, the book relates the true story of Jessie “Chubbie” Miller,...
Have you wondered how you could make a difference in the genealogy world? Your research may be fairly straightforward or have many challenges. For those researching African American ancestors, the brick wall appears relatively soon – generally prior to 1870. Dealing with the lack of surnames in the antebellum era, forced separation of families, and record loss requires a focused approach and pouring through many record collections. Fortunately, more useful records are becoming available and efforts by volunteers to index these records can make all the difference. In this guest blog post, we learn how two researchers, Stacy Cole and...
As family historians, we know the power of learning the stories of our ancestors. We’ve discovered how they overcame losing loved ones, economic struggles, mental and physical challenges, and more. We research from the comfort of our homes with many resources like computers, the internet, and access to records through online databases. What about the homeless, who are simply struggling for survival? Can learning their ancestor stories help them as well? In this guest post, I invite you to read about a non-profit organization that is connecting homeless families with their ancestors. The goal? To strengthen them in their own...
Do you have Eastern European Jewish ancestry? Have you wondered about the historical events that might have affected your ancestors and how to discover their stories? Daniella Weiss Ashkenazy’s new book, Playing Detective with Family Lore: How plugging the holes in a family history unintentionally came to tell the saga of Jews in a microcosm showcases how a journalist set out to discover her family origins. The author provides the reader with informative footnotes on each page, that we as family historians will appreciate. Written in a conversational style, Playing Detective takes the reader on the research journey, and along...
Do you have a forgotten story in your family history? One that might seem unbelievable until some fact checking proves it to be true? We all have ancestors whose story might be begging to be told. Could a family story been silenced due to shame, misunderstanding, negligence? If so we have a challenging task ahead of us to uncover more information and provide the perspective that comes with time. In Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda Lawrence Hunt, we have an example of uncovering the story of an incredible feat that was initially silenced by...
