Genealogy, inspired!
Well hello there! How the heck are you? Why yes…yes, it is mid-month and I’m just getting around to writing a few planning notes down for of September. Yeah, August was a doozy, between the farm/animal care, my daughter being home from all day every day after eight weeks of summer day-camp, and present life…
Welcome August and a renewed opportunity to reflect on what has been accomplished over the past month + what I intend to focus on in the coming month! July was my first attempt at (officially) laying out three goals for myself and holding myself accountable. Being a Hobby Family Historian and Genetic Genealogist offers a…
A little over a year ago, much to my delight, I requested and received my very first Civil War Pension File. At well over 400 pages, the record blew my mind and offered several insights into John Patrick Brogan‘s Irish origins and USA experiences during and after the Civil War. Looking only one generation back,…
Welcome July and a new approach to attacking my ever-hopeful and never-ending task list: 3+3! As I mentioned in my last post and in bits and pieces elsewhere, we family historians tend to be quite passionate about the research and documentation of our families. Sometimes, that passion can turn on us, though, leading to guilt…
Last Spring I reached out to the Marion (Indiana) Public Library about some research I was doing about two young siblings, Leah and Dale, who passed away tragically in separate incidences. I was trying to untangle the threads of oral history from fact and thought there might be a newspaper article or two about the…
Sibling Season falls in the space between Winter and Spring and is roughly eight weeks long. It is the space between one gifting a DNA test to someone, that person taking and submitting that test, and their results being published to the site.
No matter why the test was given or taken, statistics show that surprises are more common than many of us would like to believe.
Today marks the birth date for my maternal Great Grandpa, Scottie, born in 1883, but today we’re going to talk about his death.
William Oscar AKA Scottie, is still quite an enigma to me and has been hard to find definitive documentation for except for a few tidbits and a very tragic train crash we’ll have to talk about another day.
That being said, I recently found his Death Certificate, and with the help of the internet Hive Mind, I’ve gained deeper insight into Scottie’s cause of death.
You might recall the little family history pocket notebook I started carrying around last year to keep my notes, to-do lists, and general questions in. I started it as an experiment based on a memory of a pocket notebook my Uncle Kent pulled out when I visited that contained my great grandpa Dutch’s Oatmeal Cookie recipe. I figured that big ideas and important documentation doesn’t always need to be fancy or flashy and if I could easily carry it around, then I might be more apt to use and reference it on my family history wanderings as I made my way through 2024.
Guess what?
It worked.
It’s hard to sit in the liminal space between endings and beginnings without lots of reflection, a little nostalgia, and copious amounts of inspiration, in my world at least 😉 Turning the page from one year into the next typically feels vastly expansive, but this year in particular has me thinking I have all kinds of capacity to accomplish my genealogy goals.