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…
Tag: Stanton
A to Z Challenge: Yearbook Photos
Hello and Welcome to Y Day! Welp, we’ve made it almost to the end of the challenge and so, to celebrate, I’d like to share a few class/yearbook photos for three of my direct lineage kin: My mom, my bio-father, and my maternal grandma. Class photos are such amazing time capsules and though I haven’t…
A to Z Challenge – Orvetta
Hello and Welcome to O Day! Name: Orvetta Maria Brogan Vital Information: Orvetta was born on 13 July 1898 in Indiana and died on 8 September 1973 in California. Relation to Me: Orvetta is my maternal great grandma. Tidbits/Characteristics/Commonalities: Orvetta was the ninth and final child born to John and Alice, well after Alice thought…
World Tuberculosis Day
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…
Rookie Reminder: Circle Back (Newspaper Articles and Photos)
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…
Heritage Journal – Maternal Grandma, Eve Stanton
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?
Oral History & Faulty Recall: Leah Stanton
Inaccuracies are caused by faulty recall; there is no factual research to discover heights of buildings, dates of demolition, blood types
On being bold & queer, across generations
Thanks to my maternal Grandma’s writing, I know that Nancy was a Quaker and very much a “woman of her time”. She was expected to do things a certain way and expected the same of her 13 children. Which is why, when Hannah came along and didn’t exactly fall in line, she began telling her how “bold and queer” she was.
Deliria by Eve Stanton, 1933
I live in a room that is straight and bare,
With rings on my fingers and thorns in my hair
And I hear all night against my door
The pounding hands of the days before.






