My Trails into the Past

I have completed one hundred ninety-one (191) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. Outside activities involved volunteering at the History Center and the Oakland FamilySearch Center, hiking, visiting a botanical garden with Friends of Alhambra Creek and NPS staff, and attending a party at a brewpub in Fairfield to celebrate Hubby and his brother’s birthdays. Genealogy Genealogy Meetings.  My only online meeting this week was with Jacqueline and it was short, as she had things to do around her house . Genealogy Writing.  No extra writing this week except the weekly blog posts. I had too much other genealogy work to do. Blog Posts: Happy Halloween! I posted one of my holiday postcards. Spirit – Mary Martha Tierney & her Spiritual Connection to God as Sister St. Melanie . For week 44, I wrote about my 2x-great-grandaunt who was a nun with the Grey Nuns of Ottawa. She taught school and later was the superior sister at a hospital in Ogdensburg, New York. SNGF...

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-Musings is to: 1)  Are you writing about your own personal history?  What are you including?  How are you doing with it? Who will you distribute it to?    Here is mine: Last year at a genealogy writing retreat, my friend Stewart, was working on his autobiography. One evening, I could not sleep and got out my computer and starting writing about my own life. I got six pages written. I made it up to sixth grade, at least writing about my school days. I included photographs but no source citations. I see the date of the document is 9/17/2022. I have not added to it since. I could not at first locate this file, but discovered that I have over 60 documents of blog posts I have written about myself for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, or 2011 Advent Calendar bloggi...

I have previously written about my 2x-great-grandaunt, Mary Martha Tierney, who entered the Sisters of Charity (Grey Nuns of Ottawa) in 1874 and professed her commitment on 13 December 1877. Since that post, I have learned more about Sister St. Melanie. She was born on 25 July 1857 in Fallowfield, Carleton County, Ontario, to John Tierney and Ann Murray, the last of eleven known children, and was baptized at St. Philip Church in Richmond. [1] Previously I had written that she was baptized “Mary Martha” but the baptism record supports only “Martha” as her name. Teaching Years She taught school in the old grade school at St. Mary’s Academy in Ottawa. She was later transferred to Buffalo and taught at the Holy Angels Academy. In Lowell, Massachusetts, she taught at the Immaculate Conception High School. [2] I attempted to locate city directories to support the above bio from her obituary. Searching in Ancestry for nuns is difficult. How do we know how the directory recorded their ...

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I have completed one hundred ninety (190) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. This week was spent mostly at home except for going to the History Center and Train Club show. Genealogy Genealogy Meetings This week I met with Jacqueline and we discussed possible homes in Oregon . At Amigos, we discussed what we would prepare for meals at our November writing retreat. Monday, I hosted the CCCGS roundtable meeting where everyone shared what they were working on. The RootsMagic SIG was hosted by Stewart and me. He covered how to create or edit fact sentences, and I covered how I use the free-form source citation template, which is not really a template, but I showed how I use it as such. Genealogy Writing The only writing I did this week was the blog posts I published this week and a couple that I will schedule for next week. I did some research for my Tierney family in newspapers and discovered that more of them had immigrated to the United States. Time to do some census work. ...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's  Saturday Night  again - Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to: 1)  Where did your 16 2nd great-grandparents live and die?  What are their birth, marriage, and death dates, and locations? Here's mine: These sixteen 2x-great-grandparents are for my daughters, as I research both my ancestors and my husband’s ancestors and report about them on my blog. Due to time and space, I have left off source citations. Please contact me for any specific source. The Paternal Line Amos Gorrell was born on 12 February 1837 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. He lived during his life in Ross County, Ohio, and Cooper County, Missouri. He died at the age of ninety-one on 31 March 1928 in Cooper County. He married on 6 February 1866 in Ross County, Ohio. Catharine Elizabeth Shotts was born on 18 February 1835 in Ross County, Ohio. She married (1) Lemuel Sayre on 14 January 1857 in Ross...

Some advice I like to give in my genealogy classes is to dig a little deeper. Each document that we find on genealogy websites tells us more than what is on the surface. Yeah, that 1900 census gives us the names of everyone in the household along with their birth month and year and their occupation. There are twenty-eight columns plus the information written at the top of the page. About Their Address For example, my great-grandparents are listed on the Anaconda, Deer Lodge County, Montana 1900 census page as living at 709 West Commercial Avenue. [1] What can I do with that information? I can start by using a Google Map and see what that address is today. [2]   I can search in newspaper databases for the address, as I have done here. This is a notice from an 1896 newspaper about a lost or stolen sorrel mare with a complete description. [3] I am not sure if the owners are my Sullivans, as there is no name attached to the notice.   Number of Children Let’s dig deeper int...