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Genealogy Collaboration: the Nitty-Gritty

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 Collaboration is magic! Your own work, experience and inspiration combined with others who share an interest, create more than seems possible. See  The Magic of Collaboration (and Wikitree)  for more about that. But how to begin?  First, collaborate with relatives Pick up the phone! Set up an interview Write a letter Send images, information and questions, through the mail or email, or shared documents such as Google Drive Ask them to share images and questions too Invite them to your Ancestry or MyHeritage tree Share a timeline for your family Next, collaborate with DNA matches Start with the closest and largest matches, and put them into your tree Use the site tools to figure out who they are (shared matches, dots) Use the site messaging system; give them your email and some information • As you learn one site, upload to another, 1, 2, 3! • Sometimes you will need to build their trees for them; invite them to the tree • Keep sharing as you find more information • Remember to use sha
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A South King County Treasure

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White River Valley Museum The White River Valley Museum - photo courtesy of Barbara Mattoon Auburn, Kent, Algona, and Pacific Those of us who live in South King County are fortunate to have many local museums and historical societies that hold records and artifacts relating to this area. One of these repositories is the outstanding White River Valley Museum in downtown Auburn. Its collection covers the communities of Auburn, Kent, Algona, and Pacific. Exhibits The interactive exhibits include a room from The Tourist Hotel which was located just down the street from the Auburn Depot; The Northern Clay Company, later known as Gladding McBean which used clay from the Green River Valley, artisans from Vienna, and laborers from Auburn to produce the architectural terra cotta that still adorns high-rise buildings in Tacoma and Seattle; a Muckleshoot Indian canoe, and a tour through a replica of Auburn downtown in the 1920s. You can learn about the immigrant experience by visiting a Japanese-
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New Feature: myOrigins Chromosome Painter on Family Tree DNA

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 This update is pretty great! FTDNA blogged about it here:  https://blog.familytreedna.com/new-feature-myorigins-chromosome-painter-for-family-finder/  and have produced three short videos  explaining how to make use of their work in your own research, how they produced the 90 population groups, and how they made the chromosome painter as accurate as possible. About 20 minutes each, these are well-worth your time if you have a Family Finder kit on Family Tree DNA, and you care at all about admixture, which is looking at possible origins of your ancestral DNA. Example - father At first look, my father's kit is completely boring: 92.5% Western Europe. However, 21 of the 22 chromosomes on top are 100% Western Europe; on chromosome 1, there is a small segment on both chromatids that is identified as Finnish.  Ted Cowan's Chromosome 1 FTDNA ChromoPainter Since my grandfather is 100% Scottish and my grandmother about 100% Swedish (on paper, at least) this is interesting. About half
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2021 South King County Annual Report

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  First, some naval gazing - a look at this blog, by the numbers: Blogger also tells us where people are when they read: This annual report is an abridged version of those reports submitted to the Board in advance of our planning meeting in August. The original reports are available to SKCGS Members on request. Change If we thought things would calm down after 2020, we were wrong. 2021 was another year of change. In May elections, we elected a new President, Valorie Zimmerman, which meant that our Vice-President Valorie Zimmerman needed to step down. Michele Mattoon was re-elected as Treasurer. At the next meeting of the Board, Alexis Hacker Scholz accepted the post of Vice-President. Barbara Mattoon, the former President chose not to take the post of Past President, so MaryLynn Strickland continues as Member At Large. Barbara accepted the position of Chair of the Education Committee, where she had been ably serving in an unofficial role for some weeks. Work with KCLS and BDHS Closure
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SUICE, SOOS, OR SUISE CREEK?

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  SUICE, SOOS, OR SUISE CREEK?   EARLY IMMIGRANTS   AND THEIR STORIES The Cemetery In 1988, Louise (Melin) Merritt began gathering records of those buried in the Suise Creek Cemetery in preparation for publication of an Obituary Book in cooperation with the South King County Genealogical Society. “The cemetery was originally located above Suise Creek on SE 240th” [ 1 ] “In 1903, bodies were moved by horse and wagon from the old to the new burial grounds . . ..” located at SE 256th and 132nd Ave SE. [ 2 ] “A few years later some sort of a dispute arose between the Finns and the other Scandinavians, and henceforth most of the Swedes and Norwegians took their business elsewhere. They are predominately buried in the old Meridian Cemetery or the Hillcrest Cemetery in Kent, Washington” [ 3 ] Finnish Immigrants As the project progressed, Mrs. Merritt decided to compile a history of the immigra
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How's the Water?

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 I saw this cartoon in the past somewhere and could not forget it. No images I found online matched the image I remembered, so my talented husband Bob Zimmerman drew one for me:  Copyright Robert Zimmerman 2021. Courtesy of Bob Zimmerman The reason I love this cartoon is that we all know a simple question can open us to a new way of seeing the world, if we let it.  I felt this way at a recent presentation of the Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) called  Looking Back / Moving Forward: Getting Started with Institutional Genealogy presented by Aletheia Wittman. In that presentation, she showed us a timeline which blew my mind and got me thinking about our society in a whole new historical perspective. We formed first as a branch of Seattle Genealogical Society (SGS) in 1979, and formally as an independent non-profit in 1984.[1] Here is a portion of Aletheia Wittman's timeline; used by permission: 2. Courtesy Aletheia Wittman. Numbers in the black balls are nu
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Do You Remember When Your Grandparents Retired?

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 Thomas McEntee recently asked "Do you remember when your grandparents retired?" [1] Thomas Cowan 1890 - 1970 I do remember, because they threw a party! My grandfather, Thomas Cowan, had had a stroke a couple of years before, and once he almost completely recovered, decided that it was best to retire while he could enjoy it. I do not remember the date, although there is an article we found among my father's papers from his union newspaper, describing his history, career and property out in Issaquah. We lived just up the road, in walking distance, so I saw them a lot; basically any time I wanted to. The party was fun, and I got to show up to some of the older boys who were there, sons of co-workers I suppose, about where the fishing holes were in the creek. Once I caught my little trout, I paraded up the hill and past the party and those boys, with my pole on my shoulder and the little fish still on my hook. I walked home and cleaned it there. Yum, was it delicious! But on
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