Which family would you rather see on your tree?  This? Ethelyn Stephens Jones & her parents Or this. Ethelyn, parents, husband, sisters and their husbands I wanted the whole family. But a fter extensive searching in Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, FamilySearch.org and elsewhere, I had almost given up on having anything more than names and estimated dates for Ethelyn's parents, no records beyond her death certificate connecting them, or any other birth family. In other words, settling for the first image. Then FamilySearch found the death certificate, which gave her exact date and place of birth along with the full names of her parents. Of course immediately I added the parent names and other information on both trees, Ancestry and FamilySearch Family Tree (FSFT). Birth and family information on death certificates is secondary information, and not always reliable. Still, names are clues, and the birthplace in the death certificate was close to what she stated in her marriag...

  Japanese Americans travel between housing barracks with Heart Mountain on the horizon.  Public Domain, Department of the Interior. War Relocation Authority. Day of Remembrance February 19, 2022, marked 80 years of racial reckoning since the signing of Executive Order 9066 that led to the wrongful incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. On that date in 1942, community leaders were imprisoned without arrest or trial. Families, the majority of them naturalized or US born citizens, were moved to relocation centers before final settlement in ten internment camps throughout the United States. From November, 1942, until early 1945, Heart Mountain Internment Center housed approximately 10,000 people on a bleak high plain in Wyoming. That treeless plain suffers the extremes of weather--hot in the summer and buffeted by wind, snow and cold in winter. When the camp was abandoned in 1945, it was the property of the U S government. Homesteading was encouraged and...

  It's the third Saturday of the month, about 9:45 am, and you are at your computer, ready to join the South King County Genealogical Society meeting. You are looking forward to hearing that great speaker who is presenting that hot topic!  You registered several days ago and you are ready to be informed.  You did register, didn't you?  If you forgot, do it right now! But, you can't find the link to get into the meeting! Time is ticking by and you are about to panic.  You send a text/phone call/email to Valorie/MaryLynn/Tina/any other tech person you can think of to get the link. They aren't answering because they are already hosting the meeting or otherwise tied up.  What to do? The best advice we can give is to avoid that problem in the first place.  When you register for the meeting a few days in advance, you immediately get a confirming email that contains the link to the meeting.  It will be sent to the email address that you used when you reg...

"Exhaustive research" sounds... exhausting! However, a recent case proved to me that such work is not useless busy work, but rather reveals the truth of people's lives. Reasonably exhaustive research is the first element of the Genealogical Proof Standard. My experience trying to answer the question "who was Flora Bell Cox's husband?" led me to find who I thought was the right man, but turned out to be two Ward Farrars! That there were two men only became clear after some exhaustive research on every member of the Ward/Wardie Farrar FAN club -- the FAN club being research of F amily, A ssociates and N eighbors.  The results of this research can be seen on the SKCGS Black-Heritage-Franklin Ancestry.com tree [1] .  Flora Bell Cox is the niece of Benjamin Gaston, one of the Black miners I've been researching. Flora married Wardie shortly before the US entered World War I, and Wardie served in the "Pioneer Infantry" created with White officers a...