Your Research Question Equals the Size of the Puzzle As usual, when trying to think of what to write about, something prompts the writer; and for me that is often what I've been recently working on. These days, I'm puzzling over my DNA matches tracing back to my third-great-grandparents, George Henry and Martha Willis McBee. Thrulines ®  at Ancestry.com has been a useful map from my ancestors to the matches.  The Map Is Not The Territory But  ThruLines®  are not "True" lines. They are created by algorithms from Ancestry user trees including our own; all trees are imperfect, including ours. The same process creates  The Theory of Family Relativity™  at MyHeritage. Neither tool  reveals all the details we might wish about living people, so they leave us with work to do. Fortunately, I began my research to understand my family and find living cousins, so I've been "building down" for many years. When DNA became a useful new record source, I was already pa...

In 2030 I'll turn 77, so it seems a good time to think ahead! Are you laying plans for the next decade? Please write about your plans in the comments. Barbara's challenge last week is what prompted this blog. Please read her blog if you haven't done so yet! Past I began asking family for information about their family and ancestors in the late Seventies. There were no private computers back then, and I doubt that the word "genealogy" was in my vocabulary. By the Eighties, I was writing letters to relatives and including a stamped, self-addressed envelope (remember those?) and Family Group Sheets. I still have many of those in my first genealogy notebook. A few lovely family members included money along with their answers! By the Nineties, I was online (sort of) and using genealogy lists such as Roots-L . I joined the South King County Genealogy Society sometime in the Nineties; unsure exactly when. The Society was meeting at the United Methodist churc...

Newspapers are wonderful sources for your genealogy and family history research -- and they are available FREE! You might think that your ancestors would never be found in the newspaper, but if they lived in a small city or town, or even out on a farm -- you will find them, and not just in obituaries. The fire referred to in the above "Card of Thanks" was not reported in the newspaper, but the notice was. And without this little notice we would never have known about the fire suffered by my great-uncle Sidney and his family. Obituaries can be a goldmine, though, even if you already know the date of death and place of burial. Especially if the surviving children are mentioned, you then know that they are alive at that date, and sometimes their locality and spouse are mentioned as well. Those who are *not* mentioned is sometimes meaningful too. A caution that "facts" reported in an obit are not necessarily true. Top of 1944 Seattle Daily Times article about B...