Category: Family History

I don’t like to lose things. The most frustrating things I lose track of are keys, important papers, and women in my family tree. To be fair, the women in my ancestry aren’t things, but they are so easy to lose track of, they sometimes seem to be as elusive as those misplaced keys. As I honor the special women in my ancestry, I like to take time to look for “new” details about the women…

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RootsTech 2016 is in full effect. I have been streaming content today and having a great time trying some new to me websites. After watching the session titled: Best Apps and Websites for Local History pr esented by Amy Crow I encourage you to try: www.historypin.org and www.whatwasthere.com. I love to find historical photos of the houses and neighborhoods that my ancestors lived in. I often use google maps and street view to see if a house or…

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DIY Christmas Ornaments Genealogists are often big on family traditions. Nine years ago my little family started our family history Christmas ornament tradition. It was born out of a need to have non-breakable ornaments on the tree. Our daughter’s first Christmas was heavy on taking the ornaments off the tree and depositing them around the house. Every year we have talked about doing different ornaments but have never been able to do it. Each year…

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When my future husband and I were dating I wanted to make him a unique birthday gift. I was already spending a large percentage of my time researching my family history and I knew I wanted to make something celebrating his family. I enjoyed cross stitch since I was a young girl and decided to document his immediate family with stitchery. I took a wonderful picture of the framed cross stitch and then realized that…

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Why not invite an ancestor to your family’s Thanksgiving dinner this year? Set a special place either at your table or on a comfy sitting chair. Make a place card with their name. Gather any photos you may have around the house and place them on the chair. (You may want to use photocopies.) Let’s face it spills happen on Thanksgiving. Start a family history conversation. Think of some discussion prompts before your other guests arrive.…

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You never know what a day of basement organizing will reveal. We found these great milk delivery bottles and of course there is a story behind them. As it turns out, my Father-in-law told us the story. He loves to tell a story. He worked for the Droughbay Dairy in Tooele, Utah in the late 1940’s. He ran out and placed the bottles on folks’ porches while the owner’s son was the truck driver.  He…

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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 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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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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