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...

By National Photo Company - Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6992872 Aunt Beulah's Memory "The forest fires were very bad that year.  A number of men’s lives were lost in this part of the country.  In one instance, Papa’s good judgment in using the “back-fire method” (only one other man stood by him in this decision) prevented serious losses in the Blue Creek area."   Beulah Stowe was born on the Stowe farm located on Tubb Hill above Coeur d'Alene Lake May 6, 1910.  In memories collected by her son, Larry Strobel, in 1968, she wrote the paragraph above.  Of course, she was less than four months old when the fires occurred that summer but the devastation and years of recovery certainly made an impact on her life and her family. Beulah Stowe Strobel,  Stowe Memories of Coeur d'Alene  1968 A collection of stories written by Beulah Stowe Strobel and her sister, ...

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...

Courtesy of PicPick Unknown Unknowns US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously said There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.  The three realms of knowledge which Rumsfeld cited are what we can explore by creating research reports for our ancestors and others such as members of the FAN Club, F amily, Friends, A ssociates and N eighbors. Last Monday, MaryLynn illustrated the value of researching more of the FANs of your ancestors, in The Shot Heard Round The World .  At the beginning of the year, I wrote about my plans for 2025 genealogy research , including research reports for my closest 52 ahnentafals, one every week. I'm a bit behind, and many of the "reports" are just placeholders, I've already found so much. I anticipate that the rest of this year will be full of discoveries of pr...

Generated by CoPilot 16 March 2025 Why Preserve Stories? Have you ever casually said, “when I did . ..” and your children looked at you and said, “Huh? you did what?”  When this happens to you, it is time to record the story. Thirty or 100 years from now, that story will mean much more to your descendants than any family tree you create. Inland Empire Students at Music Sessions, The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, 24 July 1949, p. 24, col. 2-3. If you think, “Someday, I will write a family history,” but you go right back to researching the marriage date of third Cousin Mary Missing, within five minutes the incident will have flitted from your mind. Kevin Kelly admonishes us to write down the idea within five minutes before it is gone. My list of experiences, events, and incidents is getting really long, so I have decided to get started so that my descendants will have SOMETHING. The summer of 1949, my mother attended a short course at the University of Washington to prepare her ...

Photo by genibee,  CC BY-NC 2.0 Have you ever had an old memory surface at the oddest time? I was in the dental chair having an implant screwed into my jaw, and there was so much pressure! When they were doing something else, I said, this feels just like the first time I ever put on a girdle. I was giggling about it, and nudged the assistant, and said, you know what I'm talking about! She was giggling too, and then she said to the doctor, you do NOT know, but ask your wife! The silliest thing about it was that I was in seventh grade! Who needs a girdle ever, much less in seventh grade? It was not about the boys; they never looked at us then. And really, we all thought the other girls were noticing, but I think all of us just wanted to fit in. For the record, let me just say that while I can't recall the last time I squeezed myself into a girdle, I do not miss that pressure one bit! Why mention this weird old memory? Well, it paints a picture of adolescent life before pantyhos...

Valorie Zimmerman fan chart from Ancestry.com Sometimes we want to take a break from researching, or our budget tells us  that we need to do so.  How will you handle this? We know that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" but you are reading this post, so you still want to learn more. What to do? Will  exploring a new (free) website  be enough? Everything—every search, every record, every download—on FamilySearch is free and available every day, all year long * . The same is true at the Library of Congress , the National Archives , Archive.org , all the US state archives, and state digital newspaper collections, your own public library system, and often neighboring systems as well! King County Washington residents have access not only to KCLS , but also Pierce County , Snohomish County , and Seattle Public Libraries as well. Don't overlook local college and university libraries, county and city archives and many large and some smaller museums. Sometimes gett...