My Trails into the Past

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has another great activity tonight. Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to: 1) Have you created a Timeline for one of your ancestors using a genealogy software program (e.g., Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Legacy, Reunion, etc.) or an online family Tree (e.g., Ancestry Member Tree, FamilySearch Family Tree, Geni, MyHeritage, etc.), or in a spreadsheet (e.g., Excel)? 2)  If not, try to create a timeline using the program/website of your choice.  If so, create another one for the ancestor of your choice! 3)  Show us your Timeline creation, and tell us how you did it.  Which program/website, the process you used, and how you captured the images to display your timeline. 4)  Share your Timeline creation on your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or on Facebook or Google+. I’m working on writing up a story about Per Alfred Lundquist, the great-grandfather of my...

This is republished from 2015. Today is November 11, a day we honor veterans who served in the Armed Forces. I do not have many direct ancestors who were veterans, but I still want to honor those who were. This list includes those ancestors of my husband (in blue) and mine (in red). World War II Tom J. Johnston Jr. Tom J. Johnston Jr ., U.S. Navy. He served just a short time and was discharged due to a medical disability. He had been stationed in Idaho. George J Gorrell George Joseph Gorrell , U.S. Army. He was a staff sergeant with the 913th Air Engineering Squadron. He served in England and Germany. World War I William Cyril Hork William Cyril Hork , U.S. Navy. He served in submarine service and was last stationed in Long Beach aboard the submarine tender,  USS Alert . Civil War Amos Gorrell Jr. Amos Gorrell , Jr.,  Union Army. Co A, 18th Ohio. G...

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing started this meme and I loved the idea. Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great documenting our own. I’ll write about what I’ve been doing the past week. Sunday, October 29, 2017. My husband, Norman, and I drove up to Sebastopol to visit our daughter, Elizabeth, to purchase some local apples, and to eat at Lowell’s where Elizabeth works. We have an electric car (Nissan Leaf) and stopped in Vallejo to charge it up to 90%. We had thought the trip wasn’t going to happen and so had not fully charged the car overnight. On a full charge, the car can make it to Sebastopol with no problem. There are chargers at a parking lot downtown where we usually charge the car for the trip home. It takes two and a half hours and we usually eat dinner while charging the car. We learned on this trip that two more charging stations had been installed since our last trip: a level 2 charger at CVS and a high-speed charger at Lucky market...

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to: 1)  Elizabeth Swanay O'Neal has a monthly blog party for geneabloggers to write about a certain topic.  This month the topic is "What genealogy 'resource' are you thankful for this year?" 2)  Please join the blog party and write about your response on your own blog post, in a comment on this post and/or Elizabeth's post, or on Facebook.  I am most thankful for the website FamilySearch . Each day, more and more records have been digitized and put online. These are not just indexes, but actual images of original documents! It has made researching so much easier. I can either find records from my own home, or if the image is locked, go the eight miles to the local Family History Center and view the images on their computers. So now there are three ways to view records at FamilySearch: Microfilm, not yet digitized. Must view at the Family History Li...

I have been reading Janine Adams' blog "Organize Your Family History" and she conducted a 30 x 30 challenge in August. What she did was take thirty minutes every single day for a month to conduct genealogy research. She is doing the challenge again and are asking others to join her. In today's blog post titled, "The Value of Daily Research," she gave 6 reasons to do some genealogy every day. Check out her post here . I have not joined her challenge, but I try to do some genealogy task everyday. Sometimes I'm finding documents on Ancestry  or FamilySearch . Other times I'm entering data from my "To Be Filed" folder on my computer. Mostly, though, I have been focused on my portfolio for BCG certification . I am currently working on my Kinship Determination Project (KDP) and in the process of writing the biographies/stories of the three generations, I end up researching to find missing documents, new interesting tidbits of their lives...

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has another challenge for us: Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to: 1)  Have you done a good job of citing your sources in your genealogy management program or online family tree?  How are you doing?  How many source citations do you have, and how many people are in your tree?  What is the sources to persons ratio? 2)  Which master source (e.g., 1900 U.S. census, Find A Grave, specific book, etc.) do you have the most citations for?  How many?  How did you figure this out? 3)  Tell us in your own blog post, in comments to this post, or on Facebook or Google+ in a post.  Be sure to leave a comment with a link to your post on this blog post . 1)    I try to create source citations for all of my events, but I still have many events where the source citation is part of notes instead. This is left over from my PAF program which I used f...

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has another assignment this week for us. I have not had a chance to participate because I was away from my computer on vacation. Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!): 1) Go into your Genealogy Management Program (GMP; either software on your computer, or an online family tree) and figure out how to Count how many surnames you have in your family tree database. 2) Tell us which GMP you're using and how you did this task. 3) Tell us what the top 10 (or 20) surnames are in your database and, if possible, how many entries. How many different surnames are in your family tree? 4) Write about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, in a status or comment on Facebook, or in Google Plus Stream post. I use RootsMagic and Randy was so kind to explain in his blog post how to do this in RootsMagic. It is a report called "Surname Statistics." I was very surprise...