Picture courtesy Freepix and Vecteezy This month SKCGS celebrates FIVE years of blogging! We've covered many topics from basic techniques to more involved methodology.  Members have contributed marvelous family stories and pictures.  You have truly made this your blog! Several of our blogs have featured online resources, either as a topic or as a source of information.  One of our more frequent of these is "Chronicling America", the free  online digital newspaper collection site at the Library of Congress .  The Library of Congress has programs aimed at middle and high school students as part of their National History Day competition.  One of the resources for research is, of course, Chronicling America and LOC is presenting: Chronicling America: "Turning Points in History" Wednesday, September 6, 2023 1 - 2 pm EDT Explore Turning Points in History and learn to use Chronicling America, a freely-available collection of historic American newspapers at the Lib...

Screenshot shows the default view of the new "Exploring Chronicling America Newspapers" interactive map and timeline [1] Somehow this week I received a copy of the Library of Congress blog, The Signal, in which I found the news about this new feature at Chronicling America. I had not subscribed to this blog before but I certainly will now!  Perhaps you might find it useful as well:    https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/ Interactive Map and Timeline This interactive map of newspapers in the Chronicling America digital library will be a tremendous help in finding the newspapers in your neck of the woods.  Just click on a dot near the area in which you are searching and you get a pop-up with the name of the town and newspapers published in that area.  Neat! Clicking on the underlined text will take you directly to the issues where you may browse or, with the title of the available newspapers, you can do a search by name or phrase.  Not all states are included; th...

Year of Anniversaries 2020--Have you noticed that there are some momentous anniversaries this year?  The Mayflower landed at Plymouth in 1620--400 years ago !  Do you have Mayflower ancestors?  Are you planning to attend any Mayflower celebrations? A bit closer to present day is the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment--Women's Suffrage .  Did you have an ancestor involved with that struggle for equality? There are many other anniversaries this year-- 75 years from the end of World War II , 40 years after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens,   You can probably name many more and please do! Do you have a hero, of either gender, someone you admire for his or her contribution to an eventful struggle? Or did an event impact you or your family?  Here is a challenge and an opportunity to honor a person or relate an event--write a paragraph or two and submit it here for publication. Here is an example of my hero connected to the Women's Suffrage Movement a...

Dr. John Phillip Colletta Sept. 22, 2018 at beautiful Salish Hall on the Green River College Campus, Auburn The day began with coffee, tea, books, raffle items and a great Silent Auction John Philip Colletta, PhD., began the day by introducing us to archives, libraries and manuscript repositories, discussing who created the records or documents and where we might find them. After a thorough introduction, he dove into several research cases, which included the records and how he found them. This was very enlightening, because so often we find one piece of evidence but never follow up to find the records and story behind the notation in an index, or sentence in a book. Before lunch, we traveled through the Library of Congress, and what research one can do in each of the specialized Reading Room/Research Centers. After lunch, we learned of some Lesser Used Federal Record, which provide detail about our ancestor's lives and biographies, rather than lineage. The amount o...