While you are enjoying the beautiful May flowers, take some time to advance your genealogy skills and research. The Family Tree Maker Users Group will meet on Saturday, May 4 , from 10:15 – 11:45 at the Auburn Public Library.  Contact Winona Laird, education@skcgs.org or Dave Liesse, at ftm-group@skcgs.org for more information. The excellent attendance at the April General Meeting featuring a program on DNA shows that there is a lot of interest among our members in this topic.  To learn more, consider attending the Genetic Genealogy/DNA Interest Group on Monday, May 13 , from 1:00 – 3:00 pm at WAPI, 28815 Pacific Highway South, Suite 7A, Federal Way .  The topic is “GEDmatch Analysis: One-to-One and One-to-Many DNA Comparison Tools”. For more information go to the GG/DNA tab under Interest Groups at skcgs.org. Have you ever done research with a group of genie friends?  It’s fun! Try it at the Research Group, Friday, May 17 , from 1 – 3 pm at the Kent Family...

By Barbara Mattoon                                                                                   1 I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. Joyce Kilmer 1914 The longer I live on this planet we call Earth, the more concerned I become about how we are treating it.  I have always been aware of Earth Day but have never participated in activities surrounding it.  This year I began to think about how Earth Day relates to genealogy, and that train of thought led me to trees. Why are trees important to the inhabitants of planet Earth?  Here are just a few of the reasons: Trees take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen for us to breathe. Trees take in dust and other pollutants. Wood was the first fuel and is still used by about half the w...

By Janet O'Conor Camarata Willis, Linda, Looking for Mr. Smith: Seeking the Truth Behind the Long Walk, the Greatest Survival Story Ever Told., New York, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010. Readers familiar with the book, The Long Walk , first published in 1956, remember a survival story about a group of men caught up in the events preceding World War II. Each was sent to a labor camp in Siberia where they joined together in escaping during a blizzard and walking south-southeast for over a year. They walked from Siberia through Mongolia, into China, skirting Tibet and into India between April 1941 and the spring of 1942. The group experienced difficulties and hardships suffered defeats and deaths, and finally, as a much-shrunken band of survivors, they reached India and freedom. The men who began their walk to freedom are all East European: young and old, skilled and unskilled workers from Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Balkans. The oldest escapee at fifty-one ...

By Barbara Mattoon My daughter-in-law, Michele Mattoon, and I had long planned a trip to the Yakima Valley Genealogical Society Library in Union Gap, Washington, to research the Mattoon family.  Because my son Eric is a student of wine, and particularly Washington wine, we decided to combine our genealogy research trip with wine tasting in the Yakima Valley. On Thursday, July 16, 2015, we embarked on the trip. Our first stop was  Lake Mattoon on the outskirts of Ellensburg.  Michele had planned it to be a surprise for me, but I had discovered Lake Mattoon just a few days previously while researching my father-in-law’s younger brother, Buzz Mattoon.  It is a very small lake, clearly visible from the I-90 freeway. From Lake Mattoon we traveled south – southeasterly on Hwy 82 over Manastash and Umtanum ridges to Yakima and Union Gap. After several wrong turns we arrived at the Library.  We were warmly greeted by knowledgeable volunteers and were able to...