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Speaking of Archives....

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Local Archives and Other Repositories After Saturday's inspiring panel discussion about how to find the majority of the genealogy and family history records which have been collected for research, we thought to consult our own repository: the  blog index  on our great website, skcgs.org .  Since the beginning, we have been visiting local area archives and museums and reporting back to you, our readers. Katie led us off with  Black Diamond, Washington  about the history of Black Diamond and the great Black Diamond Museum and Historical Society. More here  also her visit to the  New England Historical and Genealogical Society  in Boston. Cheri Sayer came to SKCGS from the Greater Kent Historical Societ y and she also visited the Highline Heritage Museum . Note: Highline Heritage has a new link .  Barbara Mattoon visited and wrote about the   Des Moines Museum ;  r ead on to see even more examples of local repositories. Nearly every community in south King County has a museum or hist
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To Your Health!

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Adobe Stock: Generative AI Doing genealogy is good for us No matter how you define it, learning family traditions, story, lore, and placing ourselves into the flow of history is good for our health. And for those of us who do research, the thrill of discovery and of connecting with cousins can't be beat. Pure joy. There have been some academic studies about the value of knowing our family and community history for youngsters, but we don't need studies to know that those benefits stay with us all our lives. In this increasingly fragmented world, a sense of belonging keeps us centered . Those who plan or attend family reunions often build memories that last for a lifetime.  Milestone celebrations  such a births, birthdays, shared holidays, graduations, engagements, weddings, housewarmings, homecomings and funerals are fundamental ways of structuring family ties, even when our relatives and ancestors leave us. There is something solemn and sacred about leaving flowers on a grave;
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23andMe: Good News?

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From 23andMe email last week Recently in genealogy DNA circles there has been a lot of worry about the future of 23andMe , the second-largest DNA database. There is reason for worry , as Kitty Cooper said in a September  blog post : "23andme has been in the news this week because its entire board, except its founder, Anne Wojcicki, resigned over her plan to take it private again. It went public in 2021 but has yet to turn a profit and the WSJ reports that it will run out of cash next year."  Cooper asks, " Why is 23andme not profitable? ...Discovering what health issues you might be susceptible to because of your DNA is not a big motivator for getting tested. Many Americans want to know their ethnic roots, for example, do they really have a native American ancestor? Genealogists may be the largest group who are interested in these tests in order to better understand their family history and find new relatives. Therefore once Ancestry.com started selling DNA tests, withi
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Careless Transcriptions and Brick Walls

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  Careless Transcriptions and Brick Walls Mary Emeline Brown Armstrong Ernst (1833-1910) was my great-great-great-grandmother. She appears on 101 users' trees on Ancestry.com, including mine. Of the 88 public trees on which she is listed, 24 also name her parents, and 20 of those give her parents' names as John Brown and Ruth Nelson, based on the parents' names recorded on Mary's death certificate. For years, those names and Mary's marriage place were all the information I had concerning her origins. Unfortunately, there was only one strong candidate for a possible father named John Brown in the county Mary came from, and no matter how I tried, I could not link him to a daughter named Mary or Emeline or even one close to the right age. Many other folks have gone ahead and linked this John Brown to Mary on their trees, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. There were no records of any kind naming a Ruth Nelson in that county either, nor any marriages between a
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Genealogical Crime Mysteries

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Vecteezy image October 20, 2024 What kind of reader are you? Do you become involved with the characters in the book, locating their setting on a map even though the main town is fictional?  Do you enjoy books that have historical settings, either time period or location so you are immersing yourself in a favorite environment or are learning something new?  Do you look forward to the next adventure that a main character may experience, thus following them through a series of books? If any of these traits describes you, you will probably greatly enjoy reading genealogical crime stories.  And you will find several authors to satisfy your hunger. Vecteezy October 20, 2024 Genealogical Mysteries are like lessons in Genealogy The authors take their characters through the trials and tribulations that most of us experience when we are researching.  We can identify with the frustration of a brick wall and rejoice with a character's successful discovery. Good authors keep their characters up
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The Magic of New Beginnings

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Renton Highlands Library:  https://kcls.org/locations/renton-highlands/ Starting a new endeavor is magic! Recently, we ( SKCGS ) were asked to open a Genealogy Help Desk at the Renton Highlands Library, pictured above. Two of our newer volunteers have been there on the second Thursday mornings beginning this September. I was privileged to be there last Thursday and help a brand new genealogy researcher get started. He walked in with a copy of GenHelp Desk flyer which he picked up at a local senior center.  When I asked what his interests were, he said, his whole family. And I know that when starting something new, there are a lot of hard ways to do it. Please show me the best way. It is not often that I'm asked for advice! It was a pleasure to walk with him over to the KCLS computers, where he navigated to Ancestry.com , to create a new free tree. Ancestry really does make it easy to get started when some basic facts are known. Along the way, I explained that while he may get som
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Basic Unit of Society

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Village, Generated with Bing ImageCreator AI 5 October 2024 What is the " basic unit of society "? It is often said to be the family. However, even in so-called Western societies, where families are often defined as a husband, wife and their children, about half the families I find in records do not meet the monogamy  standard. Often one of the partners has died or divorced, and there are other family members living with them—parents or other relatives of one or more of the partners, former neighbors or their children, "fictive kin," such as a close neighbor or relative of an in-law or former spouse. FAN Principle The more we follow the FAN principle [1] , and research all the people in and around the family, the more strongly we find that the basic unit is the village or neighborhood . While people do occasionally move somewhere new all by themselves, that is often impelled by personal danger of some sort, such as a crime or other threat. Mostly, people moved with
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