Elizabeth O'Neal at "Little Bytes of Life" has started something that should have a great future: The Genealogy Block Party. She sets up a situation, and bloggers jump in and write about it. This is my kind of fun, so I'm participating. (Good thing I discovered it, because the deadline is midnight tonight!) So here's the situation: **************** You and The Doctor (of Doctor Who fame) have just finished saving the Earth from nasty, alien monsters. As your reward, The Doctor has offered to take you for a ride in his TARDIS to meet one of your ancestors! Who is the ancestor you will meet? What question(s) do you need him/her to answer? Is there a problem you can help your ancestor solve? Will you reveal your true identity to your ancestor? If so, how will your visit impact the future? (Remember what happened to Rose when she went back to meet her father.) Will you bring your ancestor to the future to meet his/her descendants? What will be...
This morning I was contributing to a thread in the German Genealogy facebook group; a researcher had asked for help in figuring out the German equivalent of the surname Workman . One of the most useful sites I've found for investigating German surnames is Christoph Stoepel's "Geogen" sites. "Geogen" stands for "genealogical geography," and his site will help you locate possible points of origin for your German ancestors. When you put in a name, a map will show you where your family name is found today; the information is current rather than historical but still very useful, since German families tend to be a lot less mobile over the years than are families in the United States. A caveat, though: if your ancestor's name is Schmidt or Meyer, you'll have a much harder time getting a lead because those names are so common. The less common the name is, the more luck you're likely to have. Also, the site is most helpful if your family came ...
When I was an academic, I loved the research part of my job. When winter break or summer would roll around, I was always so happy to turn to "my" work, that of researching literature related to my subject, or topics related to the classes I would be teaching. Now that I'm retired, this is one of the things that draws me most to genealogy -- the thrill of the chase, the forming of theories that open up new avenues to travel, the very deep satisfaction when something -- anything -- clicks into place, no matter how small. It's never easy, though, and sometimes you only achieve success by dogged persistence, by plowing through the years and millions of documents, in order to put a coherent story together. So, today I have a story that, while not yet finished, I'd like to begin to tell, although it's so long that I'll break it into two parts. I've mentioned before that my paternal grandfather was one of nine siblings who lived to adulthood, and that his m...
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