Used with permission from Steven Young Caudill, photographer Will Rogers is reported to have said , " If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging ." Recently I found myself in a hole of my own making, and took that advice. My first step was a new custom Tree Tag for my Ancestry.com tree: SameNameConfusion to make the profiles easy to find. Previously I wrote about pruning , part of which has been using Ancestry.com's ProTools to find possible duplicate profiles. I've merged hundreds of such profiles without problems. This case seemed simple and obvious on the surface because I saw what I expected to see, rather than what was actually there.  I saw Jane and Eliza J and thought they were the same woman I saw Thomas J Booth and Jefferson Booth, and thought that they were the same man Because both families were in the 1900 census, I did not stop to notice that one family was in Missouri and the other in Iowa  The Jane with no surname had little information, so I merged...

  Soundside is a radio show and podcast about the Pacific Northwest, produced in Seattle by KUOW . There I heard a story about "One Book, One Coast" which intrigued me— "Seattle Public Library is one of 140 library systems up and down the West Coast joining in the 'One Book, One Coast' program. Dubbed the “largest book club on the West Coast,” the program is uniting libraries to explore an often erased chapter: When more than 110,000 Americans with Japanese ancestry (mostly in our region) were imprisoned in incarceration camps during World War II. The club’s first book pick: “They Called Us Enemy," according to their daily newsletter.  Links led to  https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/authors-and-books/one-book-one-coast where I navigated to King County Library System to check out the book, They Called Us Enemy by George Takei. Not only have I loved Takei for years, beginning with his role as Sulu on Star Trek, but my father had personal experience ...

  Two workers pruning street trees in London during World War I,  released by the Imperial War Museum on the  IWM Non Commercial Licence . I have been pruning lately; not outside, where as I write it is still cold, windy and a week ago, slushing.  At first, it was exciting to whack people right out of my Ancestry.com main DNA tree, because some ancient "ancestors" had no sources, and conflicting or nonsense "facts." Delete, delete, delete. But sometimes while falling asleep, I wondered if the name itself is a clue I should have left in the tree.  A recent interview with Roberta Estes * quotes her: "E very connection has the potential to be incorrect.  I’d much rather saw a branch off than continue to bark up the wrong tree. "   I find that statement reassuring.  When I resume researching the pruned line, I'll find evidence unavailable when I was a beginner. Back then, I blindly trusted other people's trees. I thought that they had done thei...

Spring=New Growth For gardeners, spring is time for sowing new seeds, and enjoying previous plantings' fresh growth and blooms. It's also time to get ahead of the spring weeds! Genealogists and family historians face similar tasks and joys. Christmas DNA kit results are appearing as new matches, and the online databases are swelling with new record sets and improved search methods, such as full text search, and updated catalogs. It is a good time to take stock of your research goals, and plan ahead for any research trips. Now is the perfect time to contact the groups, cities, towns, repositories, and genealogy friends in order to make best use of your time and money.  It's spring here in the South King County Genealogical Society too. We have an election of officers coming up soon, and MUST have more candidates! As of this writing, instead of holding an election, the Board must instead plan for our demise or union with another group. A non-profit can't run without offic...

  My mother, a late bloomer? I've never thought of her that way until last week, when I heard Melissa Barker's presentation about finding records for our female ancestors. Suddenly I could hear Mom's voice saying that her last job was most important of her life, even more than raising my sister and me. While thanking Melissa for her lecture I tried to say what Mom told me, and choked up with emotion. I was overwhelmed with grief, but also with joy that Mom found a way to heal her own heart while working in a prison! My mother was on her own from about age thirteen when she worked and boarded with a couple with young children before and after school. She wanted to pass the high-stakes test in Canada at the end of grade nine, so she could go to high school. During her time with that family, lots happened, including a burst appendix and time in hospital recovering from the infection and surgery. This all happened miles away from her mother and siblings in Calgary, Alberta, Can...

 Could YOU resist?   The Hamilton Farmer's Advocate, Hamilton, Missouri, Thursday 21 November 1912, page 1, column , "CALDWELL CIRCUIT COURT: November Term Adjourned Friday Afternoon--Proceedings Since Last Issue," Jennie vs David McBee divorce judgement; Newspapers.com : accessed 13 February 2026.  Wh ile cleaning up some McBee profiles in my Ancestry.com tree (with the aid of ProTools), a Newspapers.com link to this news article popped up as a hint for a different David McBee. I was unable to resist researching this couple, although I was almost sure that they were not "my" McBees.  But I went to bed that night baffled, having had little success in finding either of them. In fact, I intended to drop it, if nothing more turned up. However, I woke up wondering how Jennie and the children survived. $2000 isn't nothing, but even in 1912 it could not have sustained them for long.  Ancestry came through for me Valentines Day morning with a hint to the 1900 Cen...

"Doubt" courtesy of Freepik.com Doubt: hidden superpower Doubt and uncertainty are no fun. Our brains prefer confidence. However, listening to doubt can be your superpower IF it helps you stop, evaluate the situation, then  consider alternatives .  As a beginner genealogy researcher, I was not only confident, but ignorant. We don't know what we don't know. I assumed memories of what I had been told about my family were accurate. I've since realized that while no one lied to me, my memories were incomplete and so were the memories of my family members. Unpleasant facts such as divorce and child deaths were never mentioned. No wonder it took me years to untangle even my own recent family, much less more distant relatives and ancestors. The idea of research planning seemed absurd to this beginner. Now I'm looking at doubt and skepticism in a new light as I clean up my sprawling tree. I caused much of the mess years ago by accepting whatever "facts" I f...

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...

2025: What Happened, and a peek into 2026 “Father Time” by Linnaea Mallette: Public Domain license In south King County, Washington, 2025 began with most folks still recovering from a major storm, a "bomb cyclone." Unfortunately, winter storms were punishing at the end of the year as well, with near-record flooding in much of western Washington. However, our society  handled disaster as our ancestors did: with courage, creativity and by working together. We had nine amazing speakers this year and were active weekly in small groups. Volunteers staff monthly Genealogy Help desks in three local libraries, and SKCGS publishes a weekly blog.  2025 Speaker Series January:  Dr. Carol Gorman Friedel "The Invisible Man—Moving Through a Pre-1840 Burned County Brick Wall" February:  Michael Strauss “The Road to Independence: Revolutionary War Research” March:  Amber Oldenburg " Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense Registration Cards: The Largest...

Reliable research begins with the  Genealogical Proof Standard   What's ahead for family history and genealogy work next year? And how best to prepare? One of my big goals has been finished, which is recent backup of online trees onto my own computer. Most of my work has been over the past years has been in Ancestry.com online trees. Now I want to learn how to back that clean tree up into the cloud, as well as onto some portable hard drives.  Also, I combined the two backed-up trees. Next, I need to find and merge any remaining duplicate profiles. While doing that work, I will try to apply "spit and polish" to each profile touched. Spit? Polish?  Merriam-Webster says it is in part: " attention to cleanliness, orderliness, smartness of appearance ."  Why bother with such nit-picking? I think that by making online profiles not only well-researched and attractive, we can draw others to the stories told on those profiles. This is why I've always worked in publ...