My Trails into the Past

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans It's  Saturday Night  again – Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment this week from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing : 1) Think about your genealogy career - have you taken a "genealogy or family history vacation?" 2) Tell us about one (or more) of them - where did you go, what research did you do, did you meet family members, etc. 3) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status post. Please leave a link in a comment to this post. Here's Mine: I think my best genealogy vacation was when my daughters and I took a road trip to Idaho and Montana, with a stop through Wyoming to visit Yellowstone National Park. We had just purchased a new 1999 Ford Explorer and it had no plates yet, so everywhere we went, no one knew we were tourists (at least no one knew we were from California). Sightseeing The first few days were spent sightseeing. We had no real plans—just drove and...

It's Saturday Night - time for more  Genealogy Fun! Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has a new mission for us: Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to: 1)  Have you taken a genealogy research trip and/or vacation to see relatives, research in repositories, walk the ancestral property, etc.? 2)  Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a comment on Facebook. I have taken several trips that included doing research in local repositories: A trip to Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa was done in August 2017.  In 2016, I visited Beaver Co, Pennsylvania, Ross Co, Ohio, and Columbus, Ohio to research the Gorrell family.  I had a very successful trip to Faulkner Co, Arkansas and Little Rock, Arkansas to research the Loveless family. Before I had a blog, I traveled to Montana, researching in Anaconda, Butte, and Hamilton with my young daughters...

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. My first visit I remember to a cemetery was the old cemetery at the Columbia State Historic Park in Columbia, California, that we visited on an 8th grade field trip. It was an informal visit, just a bunch of us wandering around looking at the oldest dates we could find. Next visit was during the funeral of my grandfather, Tom Johnston, Jr. at Oakmont Cemetery in Lafayette, California in 1973. I don’t have much memory of the time at the grave site, but do remember the funeral and his open casket. I was a bit startled by it as it was supposed to be closed. Once I started doing genealogy research in the 1990s, I made the effort to visit cemeteries. I revisited my grandfather’s plot and took photos of his...