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Assessing & Re-Setting Goals

Posted on by Melissa Willis

I finally admitted to myself a few months ago that the family history goals I’d set for myself at the end of last year were simply delusional but didn’t have the time or capacity for properly assessing and re-setting those goals in an achievable way.

Thankfully, as the chaos of growing season shifts into a gentler Autumn, I was able to create enough space in my head to brainstorm what went wrong and how I might shift some internal expectations and some physical spaces to better set myself up for success.

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Heritage Journal – Maternal Grandpa, Phil Featheringill

Posted on by Melissa Willis

How do you pull together the moments of a life you’ve never glimpsed?

How do you gather random facts about kin from the ether and create a story from the fragments of the past that makes sense in the present?

I don’t know the answers to these questions but I’m trying and trusting that the process of creating each spread in my Heritage Journal is weaving bits of each ancestor’s life into the tapestry of my own being.

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Ancestral Musings + Shop Update

Posted on by Melissa Willis

I recently took a few extra minutes while closing out the final farm chores to watch the heat lightening on the horizon and the full moon rise over the trees while the cool breeze blew around me and rustled through the cottonwood leaves.

The liminal space between Summer’s last breathe and Autumn’s golden beginnings always call me to slow down and pull into myself, to find gratitude in the abundance of the growing season and to wrap myself up in the quieter, coldest months.

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Heritage Journal – Maternal Grandma, Eve Stanton

Posted on by Melissa Willis

My Grandma, Eve Stanton, was (as so many of us are) wild & complicated, accomplished & haunted.

So, I knew that when I first sat down to work on her Heritage Journal spread, limiting myself to two pages would be a challenge. Truly, how do you boil 80 years into two pages when it’s supposed to represent the only Grandparent you really knew as a child and spent so much time with?

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Civil War Pension File: John Patrick Brogan

Posted on by Melissa Willis

Despite my years of researching and documenting my family, I’m continually humbled by how much I don’t know and how much is available to us if we simply know where to look or who to ask. Case in point: I recently learned in a Civil War Facebook group that I could request my 2x great grandpa’s Civil War Pension File using the information provided on the Pension Index Card I found on Ancestry.com a few years ago.

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