The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Louvre Museum. photo by Carole Raddato:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0 Are you a sculptor, or a basket weaver?  Creating a work of art out of a block of marble is very different from gathering materials and then weaving them together into a basket. Humans have done such things since before recorded history, but rarely are such works created by the same person. We are all different, and so we will all approach our family history-keeping in different ways. And maybe you are an artist, quilter, painter, creator of montages. Do you find bliss in marrying your love of family history with your art? Do you love listening to stories? Capture them! We are not all natural writers, and not everyone wants to dig into dusty archives or spend hours researching online. What are your strengths, your natural bent, hobbies, and pastimes? Also, the best interviewers are good listeners . Interviews published here in the SKCGS Blog have bee...

Why, why, why, why? by  dullhunk:  CC BY 2.0 Celebrities are making the circuit of talk shows with books about "Finding My Why", defining purpose and motivation in their lives.  This is an approach to self-help for overcoming some negative aspects of one's life and adapting positive thinking and actions.  The common denominator in most of these books is asking the question, "Why?" As genealogists, we have frequently asked "Why?" in our research.  "Why did they move there ?  Why did they leave wherever  they left.  Why, Why, Why?  It is often one of the first questions we ask. It also one of the last questions we answer.  We get the answers to who, what, when and where through our research in BMD information and census records.  We trace the growth of families and their movement from place to place through newspapers and obituaries. Answering the why question isn't always so simple.  One reason is our lack of knowledge about the...

  A Rose By Any Other Name...  Sheila Unwi n:   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ A Rose by Any Other Name This is a line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  Juliet  seems to argue that it does not matter that  Romeo  is from her family's rival house of Montague. The reference is used to state that the names of things do not affect what they really are.   What genealogists encounter As genealogists who depend on names to identify individuals in our family research, we know the importance of names.   Patronymic patterns When we think of research in Scandinavian families, we immediately prepare ourselves for the John's son, Lars' son, Anders' dotter people in the family tree. An enormous number of cultures around the world use naming systems like these; look at Wikipedia for a large list:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic . Even many of the English names we're used to began as patronymics; think of all the f...

Image generated by Nanobnana 2 May 2026 If you have tested your DNA for genealogy, you are either excited by all the new information coming your way, or hopelessly bewildered—or somewhere in-between, like many of us. If you and close relatives have tested at least you can easily prove the beginning of your DNA tree, which is YOU and your biological relatives. This DNA tree may or may not be the same as the research that you have labored over for many years, hunting for official records, context and other evidence of the lives of your relatives and ancestors.  If you have been "doing genealogy" for a while you know the final step: writing it up . But how to do that with DNA evidence? How do you explain all those numbers so that they mean something, much less PROVE your tree? And how can I say it is "easy?"  I recently found the answer in Legacy Family Tree Webinars  by  Karen Stanbary, CG®, CGG® in a series called DNA in Action ; 2 of 6 which are available. I plan t...

Ethan Allen and Captain de la Place. May 1775. The capture of Fort Ticonderoga, New York. Copy of engraving after Alonzo Chappel. How do you view the history you have learned while researching your families?  I recently read a great line, "History should feel like walking into someone's living room, not like sitting in a classroom." [ 1]   I hope the history I am about to share is comfortable.   Throughout my middle and high school years I always flunked the chapters of history that covered wars.  Thanks to my ancestors, I was able to learn a lot about the Revolutionary War period.   For several of my Stowe ancestors  I found muster roll cards and pay cards; these had enough information for me to search places and dates so I could picture how my ancestor was involved. I learned that, April 26, 1775, one week after Lexington and Concord, Jonah Stowe returned from Alstead, New Hampshire Colony to enlist in the Massachusetts Militia.  He fo...

Used with permission from Steven Young Caudill, photographer Will Rogers is reported to have said , " If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging ." Recently I found myself in a hole of my own making, and took that advice. My first step was a new custom Tree Tag for my Ancestry.com tree: SameNameConfusion to make the profiles easy to find. Previously I wrote about pruning , part of which has been using Ancestry.com's ProTools to find possible duplicate profiles. I've merged hundreds of such profiles without problems. This case seemed simple and obvious on the surface because I saw what I expected to see, rather than what was actually there.  I saw Jane and Eliza J and thought they were the same woman I saw Thomas J Booth and Jefferson Booth, and thought that they were the same man Because both families were in the 1900 census, I did not stop to notice that one family was in Missouri and the other in Iowa  The Jane with no surname had little information, so I merged...