Summer is a great time to travel to the old home places and distant repositories. What's your first step?  Create Your Plan The longer your trip and farther away your destination, the more preparation you will need. Are passport, visa, special vaccinations required? Early on, write away for maps; some are available for free but arrive by mail; good local maps will help in the planning process. How about connections with researchers in the localities you will visit? Join some local societies, and start conversations with the local history groups, libraries, colleges, courthouses, archives and museums. Create a spreadsheet or table to gather names, contact information, closed dates, hours of operation. Before you leave, print your itinerary and the info sheet. Leave a copy at home with friends and family, too.  Prepare short biographies of ancestors who lived locally to leave in vertical files in libraries and archives. Ensure that each bio has your contact information; if there is

 Go There! Generated by BingImageCreator AI 'April 19, 2024 How times have changed in family history research! Traveling to your family's homeplace or writing letters to genealogy or historical societies, courthouses, local libraries and archives used to be the first step in beginning family history if there were no published books or periodicals we could consult.  Later, we had access to microfilm, which required traveling to where that microfilm was. Now, our first step is often to see what's online at Ancestry.com, other pay sites, and free sites such as FamilySearch.org . But as we know, no matter how fast these services add new databases, only a small percentage of records are or will ever be online.  Why Travel? Beyond records, though, why should we travel to gather our family history? Two reasons: everywhere is different, and only by going there can we experience that. Reading about the history, geology and social forces that shaped the community is one excellent way

Maybe it's cabin fever, maybe its Covid isolation reaction, whatever, I've felt an urge to look at travel and tourism guides! Read any good local histories lately? Maybe you’ve found a glowing biography of your ancestor’s brother in a 19th century mug book. You know the type—”George came to Smithtown with his parents and five brothers and sisters when he was three years old.” Precocious, wasn’t he? If the book had named the parents and siblings, you might have some proof of family connection, albeit secondary. But some editor determined that non-resident parents and siblings were not essential to the story. Local histories provide invaluable tidbits of information. Imagine reading that your ancestor was the first white child born in Houston County, Minnesota, or that the elderly chief of the nearby tribe always found a warm welcome at your family’s home on a snowy night.   A recent search for US tourist travel books at books.google.com revealed some astonishing and invalu

By Kathleen MacLeod Hanzeli On 23 April 1991, my father in law, Victor E. L. Hanzeli, died.  He was 65.  He was born in Budapest, Hungary on 21 October 1925, an only child.  He lived through the Nazi occupation and the siege of Budapest, which was the second longest of World War II (102 days.)  He had been a seminary student in Vienna, but due to the war he wasn’t able to complete his studies there.  Instead, he returned to Budapest, met my mother in law, escaped (with accompanying stories the likes of which movies are made!) with her and her parents and sister to the West in 1947, moved to New York City via Salzburg and Paris and eventually settled in Bloomington, Indiana, where my husband and his sister were born.  Later they came to Seattle, where they contributed three more children to the good of society.  Victor completed his studies, earning his Ph.D in Romance Languages and Linguistics at Indiana University in Bloomington and became a professor at the University of Washi