My Trails into the Past

Calling all Genea-Musing Fans: It’s Saturday Night again -- Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is: 1) Ellen Thompson-Jennings wrote Who Has Helped You the Most with Your Family History? On her Hound on the Hunt blog this week. That is a great prompt for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. Thank you, Ellen! Here is mine: I started thinking about genealogy after my first daughter was born in 1988. I started the tree by recording what my mother had written in my baby book of my grandparents and great-grandparents’ names (at least what she knew). For my mother’s side of the family, I asked my maternal grandmother for names and dates to fill in the paper pedigree chart and family group sheets. These days, I just recorded information without noting the source. The best one could say about the source of this information is “personal knowledge” as my grandmother knew these people. For my father’s side, I asked my dad’s three sisters. M...

Back in the day before Ancestry and FamilySearch got so big with images of records and many family trees, we used sites on the internet such as USGENWEB and RootsWeb.  Whenever I located a new residence for my ancestor’s families, I would check out the county page at USGENWEB for user-contributed content. The hosts for the sites would upload indexes, photos, maps, and other useful information about their county. Some counties had more information than others and often you’d see they needed a host for the county. RootsWeb was another site with database indexes, family trees, and message boards. The message boards are still available, as  Ancestry now hosts the site at https://www.ancestry.com/boards/. You can search on surname, place, or topic. In the past, it was a way to communicate with others who were researching the same families or places.  It is where I met three other researchers of the Sievert/Freitag families. Four siblings arrived from Schneidemüh...