If you are living in the midst of a story, as all of us are, do we know how it turns out in the end?  What if there is more than one story happening, and more than one challenge along the way? Courtesy of Steve Czajka creativecommons Once upon a time, there was a girl who was given the responsibility to care for her younger brother and sister after school. She was unhappy with these duties, and her siblings did not obey her and do the things she told them to do. She began to grow apart from her sister and brother, and once they were all adults, was not close to them.  As life continued, she thought about making peace with her brother. Perhaps it was losing her younger sister which prompted her to visit him, and ask how he remembered their childhood. To her surprise, her brother said, I was always jealous of you. Our mother trusted you to care for us; why didn't she trust me? I could have helped out. Many of us have compared stories and memories from our childhood with fam...

Responsibility, Creative Commons Icon courtesy of TheNounProject “Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are those who say: This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better.” — Studs Terkel [1] I see the quote above from a few people in a project list for Wikitree. Why do we continue to do this work we call genealogy research? Is it for the money? I don't know any wealthy genealogists, do you? At least none who earned their riches through their findings, articles or book sales. Perhaps Alex Haley or a few other researcher stars such as Dr. Henry Louis Gates have created a good living for themselves by sales of their books, films and related work. But nobody goes into this work for the money or even fame. Service Instead, what I find is people who want to serve their families and communities by finding the records of their family, locating them in their place and time, and finding and telling their stories. Some end up creating works of art,...

Dealing with the lack of records is one thing, but how do you confront multiple records of crimes such as robbery, horrors visited upon the indigenous, child abuse, rape, pogroms, murders, enslavement, massacres, genocides, and other disasters? I think we all encounter family history that is difficult to handle.  The discovery of a child rape left my mother, sister and me sobbing as we read the court records of what my mother's father had done.   Years ago, when I  found a record indicating that a probable direct ancestor owned other human beings as slaves, my response was simple. I stopped researching for a while.  Eventually I decided that I needed to learn more about the institution of slavery in the US, the records I would find, and the harder part; doing the work to document the enslaved people and their descendancies. In this way, descendants of enslavers can help repair some of the historical damage, because many of the records which can help descendants are o...

  If this has not happened in your research yet, it will! I came across a name in a half-brother's obituary: Upton McBee. I'd been avoiding looking at this half-brother because the father is unknown, and I thought the research would be messy . But I waded in anyway because Hamiltons keep popping into my McBee families, and here was another.  Part of the obituary wouldn't fit in the screenshot. Here is the entire text:  GEORGE W. HAMILTON, one of our oldest and most highly respected citizens, died at the home of his son, George, Saturday morning January 21, 1928, after a comparatively short illness. He was born in Pleasanton, Iowa, January 9, 1853, and was 75 years and 12 days old at the time of his passing.  On December 31, 1874, he was united in marriage to Miss Lilly Jane Henderson. To this union nine children were born, of whom two sons and one daughter prceded the father to the Great Beyond. The faithful wife preceded him in death some 15 years ago.  He was ...

Courtesy  https://picryl.com/amp/media/medelssohngenealogy-27a4b2 "AI for Genealogy" is a hot topic these days, but often it is discussed as if it's new. In fact, artificial intelligence (AI) has been used for all kinds of research for a long time. It all depends on how we "AI" define it. Remember, genealogy tree diagrams such as the above diagram were a revolution in how to think about and display family relationships. New: Chatbots Chatbot Courtesy VectorPortal.Com What's new is the chatbots such as ChatGPT. A recent article at ZDnet says, "Whether unlocking your phone through face recognition or telling Alexa to play a song, artificial intelligence has filtered into our everyday lives. Now, you can harness the power of AI to do your writing, too. At your command, AI chatbots can write that paper you have been dreading to start, write code, compose emails, generate art or even write Excel formulas for you.  "ChatGPT has made quite a splash, moti...