Dorothea-Lange-Florence-Thompson-and-her-children-in-a-pea-pickers-camp.- Nipomo-California.-March-1936; courtesy of PBS Until you begin the hunt, you never know what you'll find . When I began a research report for my great-grandmother, Nancy Jane Booth, (my mother's father's mother) I thought that I knew all about her from previous research. So I was shocked to see a Newspapers.com hint about a Sheriff's sale in Hugoton, Kansas. I knew that they had briefly lived there with their daughter's family, but had no clue they ever owned property there. The text isn't that interesting, but the details matter, so here is a transcription: (First published June 29, 1917) Notice of Sheriff's Sale Notice is hereby given, that in pursuance of an Order of Sale issued out of the District Court of Stevens County, Kansas, on the 13th day of June, 1917, an action wherein J.D. Newcomer Company, a corporation, is plaintiff, and Samuel McBee and Nancy McBee his wife, are defend...

 MaryLynn recently wrote about piecing together snippets of information ; I came across some more recent history recently. By chance Ancestry.com landed me on the profile of my uncle Hollis McBee, and I noticed a couple of new newspaper article hints, which can be a rich source of information.  Calgary Herald, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Thursday 8 November 1945, page 8, column 3, news article "Trucks Damaged, Drivers Unhurt"  mentioning Hollis McBee; Newspapers.com : accessed 11December 2025.      At first  glance, the story reveals few facts, besides that Hollis was unhurt.  But it shows me what he was doing in 1945; which  was driving truck in Cochrane, Alberta, Canada, and that he had been in an accident.  The second article places him and his first family in Great Falls, Montana, 375 miles south:   Great Falls Tribune, Great Falls, Montana, Friday 31 October 1958, page 11, columns 4-5, "Nine Marriages Dissolved"  incl...

  Elsie Schell Cowan and Thomas Cowan, mid-60s? Gramma and Grampa, as I called them, my grandparents, lived a short walk away from my childhood home. Thomas Cowan and Elsie Schell Cowan were my daddy's parents, I came to understand. My mother called them Mom and Dad too, so it took my child's mind awhile to figure out that they could not be Mom's mother and father! Maybe this was why I was interested in the family history early on - I wanted to understand why I only knew one set of grandparents. Thomas Cowan My grandfather, Tom Cowan, immigrated here from Canada in 1924. He was born in Puslinch township, Wellington County, Ontario, on his family's farm, Juniper Hill Farm. His great-grandfather established the farm in 1832, when he and his family and some neighbors (perhaps relatives) emigrated from Yarrow Feus, Selkirkshire, Scotland to Puslinch in Upper Canada. The house they built still is lived in. Grandpa's parents sold the Century Farm between 1911 and 1921 and...

Dealing with the lack of records is one thing, but how do you confront multiple records of crimes such as robbery, horrors visited upon the indigenous, child abuse, rape, pogroms, murders, enslavement, massacres, genocides, and other disasters? I think we all encounter family history that is difficult to handle.  The discovery of a child rape left my mother, sister and me sobbing as we read the court records of what my mother's father had done.   Years ago, when I  found a record indicating that a probable direct ancestor owned other human beings as slaves, my response was simple. I stopped researching for a while.  Eventually I decided that I needed to learn more about the institution of slavery in the US, the records I would find, and the harder part; doing the work to document the enslaved people and their descendancies. In this way, descendants of enslavers can help repair some of the historical damage, because many of the records which can help descendants are o...

  Education Everywhere I am an education junkie. What better addiction for a genealogist? I read books, mostly non- fiction, attend lectures and multi-session classes, listen to podcasts, and watch webinars. I  watch lots of webinars. During a recent week I had the privilege of watching three hour-long  video programs on genealogy topics. Descendancy Research The first was a presentation on Descendancy Research delivered to our own South King County  Genealogical Society by a professional genealogist located in Utah. Descendancy research is a  new topic for me. I remember attending a presentation on the topic when I was just beginning  genealogy, but it did not mean much to me then. Now I can see that it may hold the answer to  some problems in my family tree. I began watching in a vacation spot on Maui, but was soon  interrupted by a fire alarm emergency in the building. No problem: I was able to watch the full  recording of the presentatio...

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...