Chris Hagerman: Two Face: The Flip Side roller coaster at Six Flags America. CC 3.0 Tactics, Strategies, Plans & Practice I've been researching a lot lately, but not for my book on my mother's McBees, or even my "52 Ancestor" project . Those are not forgotten; just on the back burner for now. Instead, I decided to fill a hole in the tree, which has our grandchild as the base person. When we're all gone, it will be his. Because I knew very little about his mother's father's line, I decided to tackle that. It is 100% Russian Jews and we are using DNA as a major clue to families long separated by migration and other historical events. But there is   a major roadblock: endogamy . Endogamy is  marriage within a specific group as required by custom or law . Jews in the Russian Empire were confined to the "Pale of Settlement" and could not live in cities or large towns. As a result, intermarriage normal in small communities was magnified, and lasted...

Creator: Gregg Evans  Copyright: © 2025 GCE Inc. Gregg Evans in the above comic illustrates a common dilemma, so I want to ask:  What excites you? What fills you with satisfaction?   There is a reason that every genealogy and family history expert advises starting projects with a research question, and demonstrates crafting the query into a research plan to save time and money, and success. Success inspires us work through hard problems.   I want to ask another question though, about how you enjoy learning . Whether researching your family, or learning about how to do better research, we all have different learning styles. Do you learn best all by yourself in a quiet place, or with others such as a research group, class, seminar or college class? Is in-person best for you, or recorded sessions you can view at your leisure? Do you prefer reading, listening, or watching videos? Since covid-19 propelled both online meeting and education, we have an abundance o...

Chimney Rocks, Cherokee National Forest,  Del Rio, TN, courtesy of wikimediaCommons   A Double Paternity Mystery I never imagined when I submitted my DNA to Ancestry.com how much time I would subsequently spend helping long-lost cousins solve paternity mysteries. One of my closest matches was Ken, with whom I share 136 cM, but his tree did not appear to have any overlap with mine. I reached out, asking whether this was a mystery he was interested in solving. Ken put me in touch with his daughter Kim who was down for some detective work, and together we have spent months untangling the story of how our families are related.   The names of everyone except Kim and Ken have been changed due to the sensitive subject matter. Origin of the Mystery Ken's father was an airman stationed in Sacramento in 1960, who went home to east Tennessee and never returned to the girlfriend and infant son he left behind. Ken was raised by a stepfather he believed to be h...

  summer_in_seattle_baseball_safeco_baseball_stadium_seattle Courtesy of pxhere.com CCO:Public domain YES, Genealogy and BASEBALL!  🪾⚾ What?  how can genealogy and baseball be alike? SO many ways. First, baseball, like genealogy, is a team sport . While there are ways in baseball to practice specific skills like running, batting, throwing and catching by using machines. But playing baseball requires at least three people: a pitcher, a batter, and an outfielder. Many of us as kids played this way; we called it "work up" where there were no teams, just a bunch of kids playing baseball or softball (larger, softer ball).  Genealogy is a team sport . How much fun would it be to record only our own life? Some writers, videographers, podcasters, etc. do this, but I think you would agree that that is not genealogy. Genealogy is the study of our family and their ancestors, and we need a team to do that. We need, first, records of the lives who came before us. Think of all t...

150YearsofCare.org website header Since most of what I view on Youtube are genealogy subjects, and I subscribe to some genealogy channels, much of what is shown at login is genealogy. RLP 378: Interview with Gavin Beinart-Smollan * showed up, and I wanted to listen because my most recent genealogy project is all Jewish immigrants and their descendants, who mostly came to New York City from areas then called "Russia." Wikipedia says, " The Pale of Settlement included all of modern-day Belarus and Moldova, much of Lithuania, Ukraine and east-central Poland, and relatively small parts of Latvia and what is now the western Russian Federation."  Part of what makes this population challenging to research is the difficulty in locating records, and the confusing, even overwhelming DNA data. This is a result of the laws and customs governing life in the Pale of Settlement, described by Wikipedia: "The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire... th...

  From Dave Liesse — This one doesn't involve finding a relative, but it does illustrate the "small world" idea quite well! I started working for a new (to me) company in Chicago in the spring of 1994.  My manager was about my age, and his name was Jerry. After the July 4th weekend we were talking about how we'd spent our time.  He told me that he visited his father, just across the state line in Indiana.  The conversation went something like this: D: "Oh, really?  Where in Indiana?" J:  "Oh, a small town you've probably never heard of." D:  "Try me!" J:  "Whiting." D:  "Oh, yeah?  Where in Whiting?" J:  "Well, not really in Whiting.  He's in Hammond, but everybody says Whiting." D:  "Okay, he's in Robertsdale. Go on." (Note: Robertsdale is a part of Hammond, but physically separated from the rest of the city by a couple of oil refineries.  It's served by the Whiting post office, so ...