Living Family History – Cookbooks

No Family Journals? Look for Recipes and make a Family Cookbook Not everyone is lucky enough to have journals written by their ancestors. So, I encourage you to look around and find family history objects. You may already have these in your own home. Perhaps you’ll find hand written letters, old fashioned toys or gardening tools. Research what you find. The easiest question I pose is: Who did it belong too? Then I try to…

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Living Family History -Memory Quilts

Living family history hobbies such as photograghy, scrapbooking, journaling, and memory quilt making go hand in hand with genealogy. We are making the heirlooms that future family historians will find and extract the details of our lives from. It will be much more difficult for our descendants to learn about us without these heirlooms. I have been privileged to make several memory quilts from t-shirts that really capture the essence of the history of individuals.…

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What Happens in High School (and College) Stays in the Yearbook

I am wearing my detective hat and I am hunting for clues. I am hoping to find out how my great-grandparents met. In 1920, Weightman Edwards lived in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and Florence Alberta Pillow Lived in Richmond, Virginia. Weightman graduated from Cornell University in 1914 and Florence graduated from Charlotte High School (Charlotte, North Carolina) in 1915. What clues did I find? Annuals from Cornell revealed that Weightman studied to be a mechanical…

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Carrie Rice… Where Were You Married? Find Out in Digital Newspapers!

You may have noticed that several of my posts start with a question. If we as family historians start with a focused research question our time spent can be much more productive than if we let the “wind blow us here and there.” It is super exciting to find a new ancestor in our tree but that can’t be the outcome each time we sit down to research. It can be just as exciting filling…

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Do You Know What a Stereopticon Is?

Annie Elizabeth Evans wanted them in the schools in Brooklyn, New York in the 1890’s. How do I know? Because I found an article about that at The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper website. She was the president of the local Parents League (a pre-cursor to PTOs) and hosted a meeting about using this technology in the schools. (Find out more about stereopticons at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereopticon ) Annie Elizabeth Evans married George Weightman in 1865 and setup…

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Henry Miller… What’s Your Name?

We usually think of a name as a genealogical “solid.” Once we locate a name for an ancestor, we hold on tight, don’t let go, and miss out on a lot of information about our family. If we are researching from more recently in time to further back in time (proceeding in an order; not jumping around) we typically find an ancestor’s parents on a death record or a probate record of a more recent…

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Family Tree (Android) Down and Dirty Adding a Photo to FamilySearch

I was generously gifted a small stack of photos from the late 1800’s through the 1940’s containing images of some of my Reeds and Millers. These photos are postcard sized and smaller and I have not added them to my FamilySearch Tree because I didn’t feel like scanning them on my flatbed. (Apparently I was not gifted with enough energy for the task.) But today as I thumbed through the stack I decided to just…

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