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 ...

Image by  Vilkasss  from  Pixabay WE ARE ALL CONNECTED I joined The South King County Genealogical Society years ago to learn about genealogy. The Society held a monthly meeting featuring educational speakers at a nearby church. It did not occur to me that I would meet people with similar interests who would become friends. I certainly didn’t realize that I would connect with relatives. It is a long-standing joke in the South King County Genealogical Society that MaryLynn Strickland is related to everyone. I am sure that I am related to her through the Dyer family in Colonial America. Recently, I hosted a social get-together for SKCGS volunteers. The group included members who had recently joined, as well as long-time members. I mentioned to one of the newer members that I had learned through a study group in which we had participated that our ancestors had married during the Revolutionary War era. At that moment, a very new member offered that she too was related to tha...

  Childhood Diseases To follow up on the September 15 post " Power Your Memories, Tell the Stories ", here are some stories that you have sent us about childhood diseases before vaccines were available. Thank you to everybody who shared their memories here.   Polio Stories American Red Cross fundraising campaign featuring Howard Keel--submitted by Karen Harrison Karen Harrison:   My husband Paul is back row 3rd from left being held by a nurse. The hospital was Cabot Kaiser in Santa Monica and they had Howard Keel come and take photos with the children and he signed their 8x10 photos. It was a fundraiser for American Red Cross who paid a good amount of the bills for these poor children. Paul was in the hospital for six months and part of his rehabilitation was swimming in the pool there so he became a good swimmer. MaryLynn --Karen, thank you for this wonderful picture with Howard Keel.  I remember the newsreels at the movies in the late 1940s and early...

Iron lung, St Bartholomew's Hospital, London: a patient inside a Drinker respirator, attended to by a nurse and a doctor. Photograph, ca 1930.  Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) Valorie: While listening to the news about recent controversy concerning vaccines, I thought of my uncle, who died a few years back. When I was young, he was infected with polio. According to my cousin, doctors have said he was actually infected twice, with two different polio strains. He was deathly ill for many months and in an "iron lung" for a while. Although he mostly recovered and was able to work, travel and have a wonderful long life, he was never free of polio even at the end of his life.  I asked my husband if he had ever known someone with polio, and he said that a kid in his neighborhood was infected and paralyzed. He eventually was able to walk wearing braces. This was  frighteningly  common until the polio vaccines were finally available after thorough testing. It was co...

©Bizarro Piraro The comic above is funny, but history and our ancestor's stories are not always funny, pleasant, uplifting and inspiring. Life and thus history is full of tragedy and comedy, beauty and horror, and some parts are difficult to face. Survival is not guaranteed, because we are human. My family has endured crime and tragedy; my mother's father was convicted of child rape, and spent time in prison. My dad's only sibling, his little brother, drowned when only 13, and my Grampa Cowan, Donald's daddy, found his body. Terrible tragedy in the lives of both my parents, yet they went on to build a house and a life together. They raised my sister and I in that house, and my mother lived the rest of her life there. I think the security of living in a house they owned was a comfort to her, in contrast to the chaos in which she had been raised.  The reason I've been thinking about telling the whole truth of our families is that there is another a way of thinking abo...

Tina Lawson has been selected by the South King County Genealogical Society as its recipient of a WSGS Outstanding Volunteer Award. Tina has made a quiet impact since she joined our society, volunteering to solve problems as we moved from mostly in-person meetings to a mostly online group during COVID. She took our Google workspace, and made it work for both the board, our members, and eventually, our website. She even figured out how to keep our website constantly updated, teaching all responsible parties how to edit the shared calendar, spreadsheet, or PDF document, which show up on SKCGS.org. She figured out how to include our blog posts and index in the website. Tina also quietly created a publicity team who worked together seamlessly, sharing information about our meetings and our mission widely. She also volunteered to lead the bylaws team, which brought us into compliance with the new Washington State non-profit law. As a board member, Tina helped each of us use our online tools...