La Fenice Opera House from the stage. Pietro Tessarin, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons What Do You Want to Learn? and from Whom?  The 2024-5 SKCGS Speaker Series draws to a close Saturday, June 21, 10–11:30 am; Peggy Clemens Lauritzen, AG, FOGS will present " The Scots-Irish in America ." Register to attend at SKCGS.org . Doors open at 9:30am. Your Education team will meet tomorrow, Tuesday June 10 to plan the 2025-6 year , and would love your guidance. Have you heard a speaker who can take what you thought was a complicated subject, and not only make it understandable, but which leaves you eager to try it out?  How about someone who makes a method sing, instead of dread? Tell us! Write to:  education@skcgs.org Looking Back... In this past educational year, we've heard from both nationally-known speakers, and some of our own.  Our year began with Steve Little, "Today’s Limits Are Tomorrow’s Breakthroughs."...

Getting It Right  [i] From My Bookshelf Getting It Right is a style guide for consistently recording family history, making it easier and more efficient to share information regardless of which family history software programs you use. It provides guidelines for consistently recording information on paper records such as Family Group Sheets and Pedigree Charts, and guidelines for submitting Temple Ordinances for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Names By page 16, I had stopped going into my Ancestry tree to make changes in the way names had been recorded.   Now, instead of Carl R (Charles) Larsen, his name reads Carl Rudolph Larsen, and in the AKA field, the name is Charles. He was baptized as Carl in Norway and began using the name Charles after the family immigrated to the United States. Dates The section on dates contains the clearest explanation of double dating that I have ever read: “All dates from the 25th of March through the 31st of Dec...

Image by  Suzanne Morris  from  Pixabay   In Flanders Fields BY   JOHN MCCRAE In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row,      That mark our place; and in the sky     The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,     Loved and were loved, and now we lie,         In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw     The torch; be yours to hold it high.     If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow         In Flanders fields. Human need to honor The need to remember our dead seems to be part of our human psyche. From prehistoric and Viking burial mounds to Egyptian tombs and Roman coffins, from Victorian mausoleums to battleground burials and monuments, humans from the beginning hav...

Courtesy of Pixabay After a bit of literature review, the natural name of this post had to be  Collaboration on Every Level , because we humans live complicated lives. Our physical existence starts with a collaboration between parents and between a sperm and egg. As we move through life, we rely on family, friends, and institutions such as schools, churches, libraries, clubs, teams, and the larger culture, legal system and governments.  As the out-going president of South King County Genealogical Society, I see how much non-profits rely on others such as genealogy organizations, libraries, archives, historical, cultural, lineage, ethnic groups, as well as state, national and even international groups. When reading the Washington State Genealogical Society Blog , it's easy to see how we all depend on one another. The Washington Presidents Council , for instance, was formed for mutual support as Covid-19 changed our social landscape forever. It has been an important part o...

digital file from b&w film copy neg. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a09983 Our Lee and Rogers Civil War Heroines Many cultures have stories that honor and idolize both their known and unknown heroes/heroines. This story is about three women on my maternal side who kept my mother’s families alive during General Sherman’s intense military campaign in the USA state of Georgia, during the American Civil War.  These women were my known second great-grandmother and her sister-in-law and an identity-unknown heroine who was part of their lives. Caveat:   If you are sensitive to the subject of slavery and the culture of that time and feel the need to judge the current generation or not tell it the way it was, you may want to skip this article.  I am using a name in this article that has come down through two of my related families and am telling the story as it was told to me. Context is everything and I believe it is a crime to rewrite history. Allied Families Sometime after...

Key in a door; public domain. Courtesy of Picryl. In genealogy and family history, context is "the examination of individual lives within the framework of a broader history" [1]. Context is Key Context is key because  context unlocks meaning in the records we uncover , and leads us to more (and better) records and collections. For instance, finding a land description and platting it is step one, then when the plat is on a map along with the neighbors, we can see who the ancestor knew, worked alongside, attended church with, and who the singles might have married. Learning the geology of the area leads to understanding what crops were grown, and so how the land shaped the daily lives of those living and working on it. Life on the Great Plains is very different from the hollers of Kentucky or the coastal plains of the East. People often migrated in groups, and in general chose to move to an area where their skills and knowledge would be useful.  Context for land acquisitio...