White Goose Flying - Royalty free from pickpic.com Whew! January has flown by.   This month I've been re-visiting old research , led by  Ancestry® Pro Tools  power to find possible duplicate profiles in my huge tree. Along the way, I sometimes do a bit of research or even prune as I go. I hope in 2026 to really make my DNA tree shine. One of my Baysinger branches caught me this week, and I've been taking it all the way down to the 1950 Census, which of course was not available when I began building an online tree 20 years ago.  As a beginner, I allowed far too many duplicate profiles to proliferate. I didn't know how to prevent that happening, or to fix it.* Also I had no clue that downloading a gedcom from MyHeritage and then uploading to Ancestry would give me many worthless "sources" which must be removed to generate Ancestry hints. I use the hints to build a "skeleton" for a profile, finding the person and their family in census and BMD (birth, marri...

Ron Strutt: Hops Garden Syndale Farm, Kent UK   Some things I have never thought to ponder: Hops by Pixnio Hops Hops plant growth Harvesting hops Post World War I economy Low income Londoners These are all things I learned about in The Hop-Pickers Murders , the latest crime mystery featuring forensic  genealogist, Morton Farrier.   Author Nathan Dylan Goodwin once again displays his genius by immersing his readers in a distinctive time and place.  This 11th novel in the Morton Farrier series introduces us to the unique time and place of hop-pickers in Kent, England after WWI before mechanization became the method for mass production.  Morton solves a mystery of theft, disappearance and murder for a client who discovered her aunt's journal. We catch up with Morton's personal life as well; he struggles to concentrate despite his 3-year-old's drum kit "practice" and the unknown menace bent on destroying his career.  Morton always gives a lesson in genealo...

  Recently, in her Monday blog, Diahan  Southard reflected on leadership   by relating how she followed her sister to get to an unknown location.   Thanks to GPS, I hadn’t followed someone through traffic in years. That is, until I found myself trailing my sister through Seattle the old-fashioned way.   Not far into our drive, we got stuck behind a slow truck in the right lane. But my sister couldn’t pass without risking losing me, so I had to make the first move, change lanes, and then let her slide in ahead.   The rest of the way to our destination I thought about the seeming incongruity of this situation. I didn’t know where I was going, so I was following someone else. But then to get there most efficiently, I had to be willing to go first. I had to step out and actually make a space for my leader to lead. [1]   This is a profound way to view leadership, especially for someone who is...

Diamond_Mine_Disaster_Historical_Marker_Grundy I, courtesy WiikMediaCommons   Finding the Stories: Unusual Sources  Many, if not most, of us are interested in going beyond "genealogy" to "family history." More than just the names, dates, and places, we want to know the stories our ancestors could have told us. They may not be around anymore but there are lots of other sources for these stories. Sometimes you find what you're looking for where you least expect it! I knew that my paternal grandfather's family migrated from Belgium to Grundy County, Illinois, in the  1 880s to mine coal. Few people realize it, but the northern Illinois coalfields were some of the best coal in the country, strongly preferred by the railroads because it was much cleaner than Pennsylvania anthracite. However, the fields were comparatively small and pretty much were only able to supply Chicago and the railroads operating there. The city and village names in Grundy County reveal the...