Image by  Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke  from  Pixabay   There is no better feeling in genealogy research than breaking through! Especially when the "wall" has been standing for a long time. I've been working on my son-in-law's tree since he gave me the information I needed to begin. The White side of his family was reasonably easy, but the Black side was full of roadblocks, and not just the big one before the 1870 US Census: slavery and the dreaded tick marks. Courtesy https://thenounproject.com/   Fortunately, I'm stubborn! I'm part of the Wikitree US Black Heritage project, and every month they run a contest called the Connecting Challenge . This has been a spur to get those connections made! And I very much wanted to connect Jason to his great-grandmother.  I knew her name, Rosalie Dubuclet , the name of her first husband, Amadee Alexander , and when he died, 1920. I knew roughly when she was born in Louisiana, but who were her parents? While looking bac

Have you ever had this experience? You've recently learned about something you previously knew nothing about, and then someone asks a question about exactly this subject? I find this happening all the time, and love it. The  Black Genealogy Research Group of Seattle  recently gathered information about an ex-slave, Mary Jane Green of Everett, Washington, for a program. In an effort to gather more information, contacts and help with this research, a Wikitree profile was created for her.  I soon found that there is a project within Wikitree helping gather information about enslaved people in the US, using sources such as deeds, wills, business receipts, ledgers, even letters and oral testimony, called the US Black Heritage Project . I joined it, since I have other ex-slaves and at least one slave-owner to research.  Then there was another connection. In the International Society of Genetic Genealogists  (ISOGG)  online group , there was a discussion of an article called  Linked Desc