Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots
My friend, Geralin Thomas, a professional organizer in Cary, N.C., asked me to do a guest post for her blog on Five Steps to Take When Tracing Your Family History. I was delighted to write it for her.
If you’re visiting this blog from Geralin’s, welcome! I hope you’ll subscribe and come back again soon.
I just received a book I’d pre-ordered, How to Archive Family Keepsakes, by Denise May Levenick, of the blog Family Curator. The book is published by Family Tree Books.
I’m very excited to read it. I’m looking forward to learning not only how to deal with the (few) family keepsakes I own but also how to help clients who have inherited such items. As an organizer, I see a lot of inherited items–furniture, keepsakes, photographs and information. In cluttered homes, storing and caring for these items can become a real challenge.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to inherit family photos, memorabilia and genealogical information, this book might help you, too.
After I’ve read it, I’ll post a review. It looks absolutely terrific.
I have a tendency to go straight to Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org or Fold3.com when I start to research a family member. But today, I went to Google and did a search the maiden name of one of my great grandmothers. Wow, I’m glad I did!
I found a link, on Scribd.com to a published family history of three lines of my family, one of which is headed by that great grandmother’s grandfather. The history was written in 1967 and it’s not heavily sourced. But it provide information that I had never heard before (like details of my great grandfather’s service in the Philippine Insurrection) and am itching to get to work verifying it.
Speaking of Google, I recently read an article in Discover Your Roots, a special magazine from Family Tree, called Your Guide to Google, by Allison Stacy. It offered ways to use Google, including search syntaxes, that I hadn’t been aware of. I consider myself quite a good Googler, but I’m anxious to learn new ways to use it in my family history research. I’ll report any Google a ha moments here!
When I visited my parents earlier this month I had high hopes of gleaning some facts and solving some mysteries. Alas, my parents didn’t have the information I sought.
I did, however, go through a box of old photos in my mother’s closet that she had taken after her mother died. They were mostly photos that her mother-in-law had collected. Unfortunately, most weren’t labeled, but there were some gems in there.
My great-grandmother’s family, in 1903, in Nebraska
Here’s one of my favorites. It’s my great-grandmother, Rhoda Wheeler, before she became Rhoda Brown. The photo was taken in 1903 and the family lived in Carleton, Nebraska (Thayer County). Rhoda’s father owned a hotel. That’s her in the back row, second from the left. She’s only 16 in the photo. Those are her identical twin sisters in the middle. There were many photos in that box of the twins through the years.
(Click on the photo, then, if necessary, click on it again in the next screen and you can take a good look at this family.)
Photos like these always amaze me because they feel so real. The expressions are so dour, you wish you could read their minds. I look forward to learning about all the people in this photo!
