October Is Family History Month Please share some of your stories here. Send us a sentence or paragraph and pictures: m.strickland@skcgs.org SeattleBGRG.org Telling Our Stories I heard a wonderful radio show this morning about story telling, which followed a great Black Genealogy Research Group of Seattle (BGRG) meeting yesterday about telling our stories. The focus of both the radio show and the BGRG meeting was not just telling our stories aloud, but in getting them OUT -- to our families, to our friends, to legislators or whoever needs to hear and remember them. The radio show is available for listening here:  Three comedians share their thoughts...  (31 minutes),  ...discover the power of sadness   (22 minutes),  both highly recommended.  In genealogy we tell stories about all sorts of things - some technical, such as how to use various record types or sets, how to locate repositories and find what we need, and most important, who our ancestors were and...

This week the South King County Genealogical Society begins a new study group [1] , of the book Mastering Genealogical Proof , by Thomas W. Jones [2] . The first chapter, Genealogy's Standard of Proof , first considers What is Genealogy . I can't better Jones' measured prose, but here is why I do genealogy. Why? Solving Puzzles Doing the research is satisfying! When there is a gap in the timeline, finding the right record is like fitting in a puzzle piece! That bit of satisfaction keeps me at it, often far too late into the night. Especially when the family group or locality (or both) are unfamiliar, finding the records feels like getting to know that person and the time and place where they lived. The contrast in how the lives of some the folks in the family fall into a pattern, and those who bushwhack their own path, is often surprising.  Why? Putting Meat on the Bones So solving puzzles are fun, but genealogy is work, too. Aside from the little rewards, there is enormous...