Genealogy, inspired!
Today marks the date in 1882 that Dr. Robert Koch announced his discovery of the bacteria that causes Tuberculosis, also known as TB or (for us family historians) Consumption. To commemorate World Tuberculosis Day, I’d thought I’d share a personal story about TB. A story about how it brought my maternal Grandma from her hometown…
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…
In order to kick start my new site and find my genealogy groove again after a few months of focusing on a single ancestor in my free time, I’ve decided to challenge myself by participating in the 2025 A to Z Challenge. This will be my first time participating in such a challenge and I…
If you’ve been around for a while, you might notice that the site looks a bit different today than it did last week! That’s because, after two years of genealogy blogging on Squarespace and micro-blogging on Instagram, I’ve decided to switch it up and move to WordPress. Why is that? Well, while Squarespace offered an…
Have you ever felt like you were the only one who felt or thought a certain way? Like you were a black sheep because no one else you’ve known in your life has reacted to or perceived things in the same way as you do? Maybe you’ve felt foolish or misunderstood or maybe you just didn’t even know how to explain to anyone what you were thinking or experiencing?
Let me tell you, I felt this way for decades.
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.