Genealogy
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Sunday, February 10th, 2013Do you have any ancestors that seem to be the end of the line? Forebears that resist every effort to discover enough to go back any further? Try working on someone else. No, I don’t mean give up. I mean work on someone who seems suspicious, someone who seems to be associated with your ancestor. [...]
Clues to Clues
Sunday, February 3rd, 2013Do you ever read compiled genealogies? Your answer is probably “yes” and if it isn’t, it probably should be. Part of doing research is understanding what has already been done. Once you know what has been done the next step is to figure out if it has been done right. The next step is not [...]
Duckuments
Sunday, January 27th, 2013Duckument* (n) – papers that reveal a terrible error. Origin- derived from the Cold War civil defense phrase “duck and cover” combined with the word document. Genealogists encountering a duckument are advised to hide beneath their desks until they come to terms with the duckument’s implications. Classification of Duckuments Duckuments are found in three types- [...]
Tall Tales
Sunday, January 20th, 2013When I started being interested in my family history one of the things my aunt taught me was that sometimes family stories turn out to be wrong. It was an easy lesson for her to teach. The family story that had most fascinated me was something that she proved to be untrue. That story had [...]
The Shoebox in No-Man’s-Land
Wednesday, January 16th, 2013There is a facet of research that nags at me every so often. The other day was one of those days. Sometimes when we find something, we know exactly what it means. We can almost immediately claim that we understand it fairly well and if we are lucky and thinking clearly, we won’t need to [...]
Rest in Peace
Sunday, January 6th, 2013This is, even now, not an easy post to write. When I wrote a genealogical obituary for my Aunt Melva, I was saddened but not surprised that her time had come. No one expected my father-in-law to be proclaimed terminally ill or that he would be gone so fast. Our youngest daughter had traveled to [...]
The Genealogist’s Auld Lang Syne
Sunday, December 30th, 2012Last year I left seriousness behind in a parody post for Christmas Eve. This year’s holiday post is a bit of a parody too but I was in more serious mood while writing it and it came out much less silly. I could almost imagine singing this. So with apologies to the great Robert Burns- [...]
Trying the Not
Sunday, December 16th, 2012Sometimes the path we walk with our ancestors is a bit convoluted. Sometimes that is an understatement. Often we reach a dead end and wonder why. Sometimes, though the path is correct, here and there our clues to our ancestors’ strange trajectories can turn out to be the reddest of herrings. Every virtue has a [...]
404-Ancestor not found
Sunday, December 9th, 2012The other day, a link that I clicked at just the wrong moment was dead by the time my internet connection was brought back to life hours later. I saw a number that you don’t generally want to see on the web, 404. My page was not found. But this 404 page was pretty informative. [...]
Pyrrhic Research
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012Heinrich Schliemann is not a name that rolls off the English speaking tongue and his name probably doesn’t appear among your ancestors but I think that he has some interesting things to say about the genealogical research we do. Heinrich did research as well, though not genealogical. Even so, he started with oral history, exactly [...]
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