My Trails into the Past

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has a new mission this week. Our mission this week is to: 1)  The Family History Hound listed 20 Questions about your Ancestor, and I'm going to use some of them in the next few months.   2)  Please answer the question - "What heirloom do you have that has been handed down through the generations?"   3)  Write your own blog post, make a comment on this post, or post  your answer on Facebook or Google+.  Please leave a link to your answer in comments on this post. This was an excellent challenge for me. I began thinking about heirlooms that I have and that I had not previously taken photos of them. An now looking that them, I realize I need to buy some archival boxes and tissues to preserve them properly. I get my archive advice from Melissa Barker, The Genealogist in the Archives blog writer, who wrote this post about using archival boxes . So I have two items that meet Randy’s requirement and since I took...

I have recently returned from a twelve day vacation to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, Mitchell, South Dakota, and Stanton-Red Oak, Iowa. Conference In Minneapolis, I attended the three-day International Germanic Genealogy Conference hosted by the local society, Germanic Genealogy Society. This was the first conference and in 2019, our local society, Sacramento German Genealogy Society, will be the hosts! I met lots of genealogists from around the country and the world. Especially exciting was meeting in person, Ursula Krause from Berlin. Some of the classes I attended: “Finding Your Ancestors in German Directories” – Ursula C. Krause “World War I Era U.S. Alien Registrations” – Paula Stuart-Warren “Meyers Orts Gazetteer” – Fritz Juengling “Die Pfalz: Understanding and Researching in Palatine Records” – Richard Haberstroh “Baltimore: The Golden Door for Immigrants” – Debra A Hoffman “Pioneers and Colonists: Background of Germans in Eastern Europe” – James Beidler The conf...

Randy Seaver has another great challenge : 1)  This SNGF is based on the 100 Word Challenge (https://100wc.net/) that school children are participating in around the world.  They are given a word or phrase to write a story about in one hundred words. 2)  Write a short 100 word story using the phrase ",,,the most interesting ancestor I have..." in 100 words.   The most interesting ancestor I have is my aunt, Lorene Ethel Hork (1923—2013). As our “fun” aunt, she loved hearing stories about our lives. But she lived a great one herself. She worked as a civilian for the Army  in Japan after World War II. Eighteen months later, she and three other young women traveled around the world visiting Asia, the Middle East, Egypt,  and Europe. She returned in 1953 aboard the RMS Queen Mary . Living in San Francisco and San Diego, she worked for the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the same place as her husband, Wally Waldron. Copyright © 201...