Image by  Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke  from  Pixabay   There is no better feeling in genealogy research than breaking through! Especially when the "wall" has been standing for a long time. I've been working on my son-in-law's tree since he gave me the information I needed to begin. The White side of his family was reasonably easy, but the Black side was full of roadblocks, and not just the big one before the 1870 US Census: slavery and the dreaded tick marks. Courtesy https://thenounproject.com/   Fortunately, I'm stubborn! I'm part of the Wikitree US Black Heritage project, and every month they run a contest called the Connecting Challenge . This has been a spur to get those connections made! And I very much wanted to connect Jason to his great-grandmother.  I knew her name, Rosalie Dubuclet , the name of her first husband, Amadee Alexander , and when he died, 1920. I knew roughly when she was born in Louisiana, but who were her parents? Whil...

 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 • ...

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-...

 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) t...