Posted by James Tanner on November 12, 2009 at 7:52am
I recently had a discussion with a patron at the Mesa Regional Family History Center who was trying to learn more about genealogy to help others with their research. She indicated that she was sort of serving by default as the Ward Family History Consultant in her LDS Ward. During the discussion she mentioned that a member of her Ward was teaching classes and insisting that everyone had to use Personal Ancestral File. Apparently, as I have mentioned in the past, some people think their is a reli
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Posted by Fred Close on November 11, 2009 at 10:10pm
I believe that the solution to my riddle is that there was a generation left out of the oral history told by my great grandmother.I have looked at an 1805 marriage in Stretham, Surrey between James Wicks and Mary Chitty but repeatedly discarded it because of my great grandmother’s story and the certainty that Mary must have been a Russell. Finally – and mostly because of a lack of other possibilities – I decided to research this marriage and search for the Chitty family.I had, with the help of s
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My GGG Grandfather Josiah Rucks, born in Chesterfield Co., VA in 1759 and died and buried in Smith Co., TN in 1836, fought with two of his brothers in the American Revolutionary War. He was given title to land in Smith Co., TN where he settled and formed a Baptist Church at Knob Springs. He is buried on what was his estate at Smith Co., TN. His headstone reads "A Rev War Soldier". At one time the DAR accepted this as proof of his service, but this is no longer true. I have been trying to find hi
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Abijah Franklin Hitchings, Civil War, Co. I, 8th Reg. Mass. Vol. Inf.Veterans Day 2009The further your family tree goes back in time, the more chances you have of finding an ancestor, sibling, or distant cousin who served as a soldier or sailor. My first advice is to continue collecting oral histories, and asking all your older relatives about anyone they might have known who served in the military. Use those oral histories to build your family tree, and to investigate the possibilities of provi
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The theme of Veteran’s Week this year is “How Will You Remember”.The Library and Archives Canada has put on their website "Welcome to Canada at War: a Guide to Library and Archives Canada Recalling the Canadian War Experience".For information on the role that the Canadian military played during the Second World War, please go to the virtual exhibit called Faces of War at <<a href="http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/faces-of-war/index-e.html">www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/faces-of-war/index-e.html>
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The 7th annual Legacy Genealogy Cruise, held November 8-21, 2010, starts and ends in Sydney, Australia and visits the following New Zealand ports: Fjordland National Park, Dunedin (Port Chalmers), Christchurch (Lyttelton), Wellington, Napier, Tauranga, Auckland, and Bay of Islands. We will sail on Princess Cruises Sun Princess ship.Click here to continue reading about the genealogy classes at sea, the ship, and pricing.
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October 29th, 2009 | Written by TylerToday Footnote.com announced it will digitize and create a searchable database for all publicly available U.S. Federal Censuses, ranging from the first U.S. Census taken in 1790 to the most current public census from 1930. Through its partnership with the National Archives, Footnote.com will add more than 9.5 million images featuring over half a billion names to its extensive online record collection.With over 60 million historical records already online, Foo
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From February 2, 2009This past weekend Isabelle and I flew to Northern Mississippi to work with a new client on creating a tribute video biography. It was a really fun, albeit short trip but we managed to cram a lot into two days.We flew a commercial airline from Houston to Jackson Mississippi on Saturday where our client picked us up in his private plane and flew us another half hour to a smaller airport in the Northern part of the state. Isabelle was a bit nervous about being in such a small (
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Posted by James Tanner on November 9, 2009 at 7:34am
Having spent a goodly portion of my life in libraries, both as a patron and a library employee, I am aware that there are a lot of things about seeing books on shelves and having them to read that are lost when the books are digitized. The greatest loss is the synergy of having books grouped together. No catalog or index can give you the perspective of reading the shelves, that is, looking at each book in turn about a particular subject. Whatever the limitations of the Dewey Decimal System of ca
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“Ballad of Cassandra Southwick”For Bill West's Great American Local Poem Genealogy ChallengeThere are lots of interesting characters in New England, like Cassandra, and many have had their stories made into poems. Longfellow tangled the story of another ancestor, Myles Standish, in his famous courtship poem, and the story of Paul Revere was one of his most famous, and most inaccurate, poems. In this poem, John Greenleaf Whittier got the story more or less correct, but he names the heroine after
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Posted by James Tanner on November 8, 2009 at 5:20pm
FamilyInsight is a highly useful add-on tool for Personal Ancestral File (PAF) users who want to do many of the things that PAF won't do, particularly with New FamilySearch. The features of the program give PAF real utility, but unfortunately you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. (Actually, you can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but the question is, who would want to?). PAF is not going to be supported in the future by FamilySearch and as time goes on and more and more informat
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Posted by James Tanner on November 7, 2009 at 5:46pm
When I was young and had time to do things other than genealogy, I used to practice archery from time to time. I would set up various targets to shoot at in the yard, which was big enough to use for the activity. Inevitably, I would shoot all of my arrows and miss the target at least a couple of times. In targets, think cardboard box, not the nice straw kind with big circles. Anyway, there were a couple things I did know when I started to search for my lost arrows. First, the arrow could only go
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I have been meticulously going through my creole ancestral line from southeastern Louisiana, but the hardest feat of all is that my creole ancestors had kept an immense amount of secrets for which have hugely deterred their future descendants from growing the family tree. The most effective genealogical site of all has been ancestry.com for which I have gotten a wealth of information by searching through the U.S. Federal Census recently. It was definitely a wonderful ancestral site to connect to
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Surnames are interesting they tend to litterally drive us to hunt in weird places and do strange things.Surnames are very early in origin in some forms, late in origin in other forms. Whether your native or non,surnames have been used around and around. Son of Peter son of David son of William, become, PetersonDavidson, and Williamson, now if your Russian it still works. OV and OFF are the derrivatives but today I can notremember which work for which. Many countries have some form of Pattern to
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Eliza Early Swain", Hutchinson;s Danville Virginia, Greene Georgia, Philadelphia,, PAhave had no success in finding Eliza Early ggrandmother searching since 1998???
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Following Frida,y O yes, Following Friday is Saturday and Sunday etc. But we know that is not what the intent was for the blog post. :>)I posted my response on my blogger.com page but thought I would make more comments here. For those of you whohave not started to blog or not sure how. It is a great source for getting information out to family, friends and kin. It breaks up the tedious sometimes reading of Wills, Deeds, County HIstories etc. It can enlighten you and help you have more fun.So to
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Posted by James Tanner on November 6, 2009 at 8:05pm
I have been running Windows XP since shortly after its release. After reading many reviews, I elected not to upgrade my home computer to Windows Vista but some time ago, our office computers were all upgraded. So I have been running both Windows Vista and my older versions of Windows XP for a considerable time. During the past week, I have been working with Windows 7 installed on my iMac using Parallels Desktop. I feel that I have a pretty good level of experience with both Vista and XP to adequ
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Looking for the Father of Peter Gates from Groton, New London, Connecticut. Peter was born 26 Feb 1750. An ancestry tree puts Peter as the son on Zebadiah Gates and Sarah Woodmansey but the Book (found on Google Books) Stephen Gates of Hingham and Landcaster, Massachusetts and his descendants by Charles Otis Gates does not support this. It has a completely different list for children of Zebadiah Gates which does not include children: Mary, John, David (brother of Peter who owned land with him in
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I am researching two ladies in my collateral line. One is Desire Avery and the other is Irene Avery. Desire Avery married Ephriam Gates whose sister Lephe Gates married John Riddle (Riddell). Desire Avery was born 5 March 1788 in Leyden, Hampshire County, Massachusetts. The other Avery is Irena who married Miles Coon of Manlius, Onondaga New York. Irena Avery was born in 1818 and died in 1903, she is buried in Hillside Cemetery, Palymra, Jefferson County, Wisconsin. One of my research objectives
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