My Trails into the Past

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment today from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing , is to: 1)  What genealogy record collections would you like to see digitized or indexed?  List one or more. 2)  Put it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link in a comment to this post. Here’s mine: To be indexed: Randy’s suggestion of land, probate, and civil court records available at FamilySearch to be indexed is a good one. I would have listed the same. I would add: Church records, such as this one from Oberhundem, in Westfalen. That one magnifying glass is for a church in Paderburg, another church on the same microfilm, which has been indexed. For records to be digitized, I would like to see all land, probate and civil court, tax, and voting records after 1900 up to at least 1950. I would also like to see more records in western states to b...

In many older Catholic churches, stands of small votive candles can be seen on the side of the church or in alcoves. The ones I remember were red and when lit, glow dimly. I have not seen these candles in other kinds of churches. This seems to be a Catholic tradition. One article explained that Catholics light a candle for a loved one, either deceased or perhaps ill. They wish for some divine intervention to solve a problem, so light a candle, and make their intention known through prayer. [1]   I remember the candles in St. Peter Martyr’s Church in Pittsburg, California. Nana took me many times to Mass and after I had my First Communion, to confession on Saturdays. She would give me a coin, maybe it was a nickel or a dime, so I could light a candle and say a prayer. What I do not remember is whom I said the prayer for. Nana said prayers for many people. I guess because she was so much older, she knew many people who had died, like her mother, who died when she was twenty, and h...

I have completed one hundred fifty-nine (159) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. My outside activities included working at the History Center, doing phenology, bird watching, having lunch with my sisters at Jack’s, and enjoying San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with my husband and daughter on my birthday. Genealogy Blog Writing : Membership--Swedish-American Church Records Provide Fine Details I gave examples of how the membership pages in these church records give vital records and place of origin information. It was highlighted on Linda Stufflebean’s Friday’s Family History Finds . SNGF: A Fearless Female Post (sisters Susanna & Wilhelmine Radunz) I chose to find a problem and create a timeline. Here is hoping to locate Susanna’s and Wilhelmine’s parents. Meetings/Discussion Groups This week I met with Jacqueline and we discussed her writing sample, Amigos where we caught up on our activities, and RootsMagic SIG and watched Stewart as he created citations. I atte...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - time for some more Genealogy Fun!!     Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings : Check out Lisa Alzo's "Fearless Females 2023" blog post prompts and write about one of them. Here's mine: I have done many Fearless Females posts in the past but have not done day 20, so here is my post. March 20—Is there a female ancestor who is your brick wall? Why? List possible sources for finding more information. I have many women whom either I don’t know their surname or I know the surname but don’t know her parents. Let's look at Susanna Radunz. Susanna Radunz was married to Vincent Sievert on 10 February 1850 in Schneidemühl, Posen. I do not know the name of the church or any other details except the date. [1]    They came to the U.S. on 23 June 1852 aboard the Johanna Elise. [2] Later, I found W. Sievert with his wife and child on the Hamburg passenger list. This document confi...

Church records are always a nice resource to document events in a family’s life. Sacramental records such as baptisms, marriages, and funerals have always been a go-to resource for family genealogists. These supplement civil registration or even substitute for them when these events occur before the advent of civil registration. There are other records to be found in church records. Churches kept minutes of their meetings and an ancestor might be mentioned in them, especially if they were part of the governing group. Records of receiving communion or entry into the full church membership through confirmation are other records that often can be found. One of the best records found especially in Swedish-American churches are the membership records. My husband’s families were members of both the Swedish Lutheran and the Swedish Covenant churches. Both churches kept records of their memberships. From these records, you can learn when they joined the church and when they left, if they...

I have completed one hundred fifty-eight (158) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. My outside activities included working at the History Center, doing phenology, bird watching, and working the train club weekend shows. Genealogy Blog Writing : Lucky – My Parents’ New Home They didn’t have to move far! SNGF: Are/Were You a Wild and Crazy Genealogist?   I wrote about the time my husband and I searched through eight cemeteries in Faulkner County, Arkansas. Bless his heart! Meetings/Discussion Groups This week I met with Jacqueline, attended the Kinseekers military SIG, and met with my certification mentee, and another Northern California APG member about rekindling the NorCal group. The AppGen founders had a brief meeting and will meet again on Monday. Volunteer John and I worked some on the library inventory, and I worked on foldering a new collection that came in. Next up is to write a finding aid and enter it into Past Perfect. I took the minutes of the histori...

Hey genea-folks, it's Saturday Night again, time for more Genealogy Fun! Our mission this week from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to: 1) What is the most wild, crazy, off-the-wall, or really stupid thing you have done in pursuit of your ancestral families and their family history? Here’s mine: I don’t know if I have ever done a wild, crazy, off-the-wall or really stupid thing in pursuit of my genealogy. I try to be very careful in my research. I recorded what I found in notebooks and didn’t just make photocopies. I knew enough to record some kind of citation even if it wasn’t to Evidence Explained standards (of course that book wasn’t even written yet. I used Evidence! Elizabeth Shown Mills first book.) But a wild thing my husband and I did in pursuit of my having my own copies of tombstone photos was to seek out eight different cemeteries around the Greenbrier area in Faulkner County, Arkansas, and comb through them looking for my Loveless ancestors and collate...