Iron lung, St Bartholomew's Hospital, London: a patient inside a Drinker respirator, attended to by a nurse and a doctor. Photograph, ca 1930.  Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) Valorie: While listening to the news about recent controversy concerning vaccines, I thought of my uncle, who died a few years back. When I was young, he was infected with polio. According to my cousin, doctors have said he was actually infected twice, with two different polio strains. He was deathly ill for many months and in an "iron lung" for a while. Although he mostly recovered and was able to work, travel and have a wonderful long life, he was never free of polio even at the end of his life.  I asked my husband if he had ever known someone with polio, and he said that a kid in his neighborhood was infected and paralyzed. He eventually was able to walk wearing braces. This was  frighteningly  common until the polio vaccines were finally available after thorough testing. It was co...

©Bizarro Piraro The comic above is funny, but history and our ancestor's stories are not always funny, pleasant, uplifting and inspiring. Life and thus history is full of tragedy and comedy, beauty and horror, and some parts are difficult to face. Survival is not guaranteed, because we are human. My family has endured crime and tragedy; my mother's father was convicted of child rape, and spent time in prison. My dad's only sibling, his little brother, drowned when only 13, and my Grampa Cowan, Donald's daddy, found his body. Terrible tragedy in the lives of both my parents, yet they went on to build a house and a life together. They raised my sister and I in that house, and my mother lived the rest of her life there. I think the security of living in a house they owned was a comfort to her, in contrast to the chaos in which she had been raised.  The reason I've been thinking about telling the whole truth of our families is that there is another a way of thinking abo...

Casting Your Net Fishermen in a Rowboat Throwing the Net by  fabianoshow   How many family trees have you started? I tend to want everyone together in one tree, but there are lots of reasons to have separate ones. My latest project is working on a tree for our grandson which was started by his Goldsmith grandfather. Since there will be little to no overlap between Steve's Eastern European Jewish tree and mine, it seemed simplest and most logical to just work in his tree, with his DNA matches. It's a fresh challenge and quite exciting so far. I wrote before about digging up records for the base of the tree, which has worked well.  When Steve's AncestryDNA results came in, it was fun to place all the closer cousins in the tree. Just the usual challenges finding all the living people; thank goodness for good hints including other people's trees with records. I never copy anyone's tree; instead I call up the records and analyze those, then enter the data directly from ...

 Time Horizon   Ttime Horizon by   nicola2002f (pixabay.com)   How far do you see into your future? It turns out, not only does that vary widely, but it makes a huge difference in how we live our lives. The same was true of our ancestors, but the reason I'm writing about this is that it governs how we choose to do our work. When I was young, I was interested in knowing more about my family history, but did not have the know-how. These days, many aspects are easier, but it seems like I'm running out of time. And that's OK, because it helps to focus. For more about this, listen to The Best Years of Your Life , part of the Hidden Brain podcast.  So how can I do ALL the THINGS?  I think the best way to focus is to first, listen to my heart. What do I truly want to investigate, do for someone, or even finish up? So it starts with a question, which can then become a plan . It is important to me to write it down, so even if there is inter...

Personal Experiences Hurricane David Savannah GA, Sept 4, 1979 Sometimes we are able to live through a disastrous storm and be able to find pleasant memories about it years later. September 4, 1979, Hurricane David made landfall at Savannah, Georgia, after a devastating path through the Caribbean. My husband, son and I were living in there in a row house near the historic downtown area.  My husband was a native of Savannah so he knew how to prepare for the storm. I had grown up in eastern Montana and Wyoming so I had no experience with hurricane storm patterns. Row Houses Early that day, as the rain was already filling the storm drains and causing street flooding several inches deep, we hurried to the grocery store and got chicken and vegetables, other necessary foods and some presto logs to use in our fireplace.  Then it was home again so I could start cooking meals that could be heated in the fireplace. I finished the stove cooking just a few minutes before we lost electrici...

The recent flooding destruction and tragedy in the hill country of central Texas shows us that people often choose to live close to danger. Closer to home, remember when " Mount St. Helens erupted for nine hours on May 18, 1980 destroying plant and animal life in the surrounding 230 square miles of forest and killing 57 people. In this post-eruption image, Spirit Lake is buried by debris." Famously, Harry Truman refused to leave his home on Spirit Lake, and is presumably buried under the debris shown in the photo below. Mt. St. Helens from  https://catalog.archives.gov/  via Picryl.com Recovery from this utter destruction seemed impossible, but the next photo shows that nature is creative and resilient—and so are we humans.  Aerial photo of Mount St. Helens (center), with Mount Hood (in the distance, far left), Spirit Lake (on left with floating log mat), and St. Helens Lake with a little ice cover (lower left). USGS image taken by K. Spicer on June 6, 2024. Public Domain...

William McBee (Mackbey) with Louisa Smith, and at bottom, their daughter Martha Jane, with other relatives. ✪ Why is 1850 so important in US research? Because this is the first year each person in the US Census was named, and both age and birthplace  usually  noted. From 1790 through 1840, the US Census named only free heads of household, usually (but not always) the oldest man. The rest are divided by age groups and assigned tick marks. Before 1870, enslaved and some other non-White persons were also noted separately. Good News! Is this a terrible obstacle? Fortunately not, because as we travel up the tree from the present to the past, clues are found in many records which can lead to finding the parents, even when men married multiple women with the same name. Fortunately, most of us are already using the best strategy to find more distant ancestors, but we will need to focus on details to get the most out of our work.  There is an excellent talk by Julia Anderson...

Growing Trees As genealogists and family historians, we think of our research as growing trees. In the field of science over the past few decades, there has been an effort to grow more trees, as a way to make up for all the forests that have been cleared as humans have moved in to farm, and build villages, cities and  businesses. Nurturing Forest Webs Recently, research has shown that "monoculture" where only one kind of tree is planted, does not have the same benefits as forests do. As a result, there has been more research to see why there is a difference. In short, what they have found is that a forest works as a system, not a just a group of plants and animals. The similarities to human communities were striking; forests operate as complex systems of interacting parts, including living members and other elements. Such interactions create intricate webs of interdependence, with key processes such as energy flow and nutrient cycling sustaining life for all who live there [1...