Recently, I've been doing some work in Lost Cousins, a site and idea that is unique. I get their newsletter and prompted by the "Free on Easter" section, started buffing up my listed relatives. It is unusual in that it promises  100% accurate automatic matching between researchers who share the same ancestors - and it does without anyone else seeing your data! -  https://www.lostcousins.com/pages/info/how_to.mhtml It is free to create a profile, and if you have ancestry in England, Scotland, Wales, Canada,  Australia, Ireland or New Zealand  this site can help you strike gold (cousins). As the home page explains,  ... the best people to help you knock down your 'brick walls' are your cousins - indeed, one of your cousins may already have solved the problem that you're finding so challenging. The more relatives from the census you can enter on your My Ancestors page, the more cousins you'll find. How to find more lost cousins In the past rese...

by Winona I. Hahn Laird The year was 1944 and our country was in the middle of World War II.  I was eight years old and lived in Denver, Colorado with my mother, father, sister and two brothers.  I remember the day my father went in to sign up for the Army.  My mother cried all day until he got home and she found out he was 4F.  They wouldn’t take him into the service because he had a heart murmur.  In those days a heart murmur was very serious.  They really wanted him in the Army because he was a doctor. Since my father couldn’t serve his country in the Army, he bought a Doctor’s practice in Casper, Wyoming.  Many things had to be taken care of in preparation for the move.  To purchase gas there were gas stamps, so they had to save up enough gas stamps to make the trip.  The move could only take one day while pulling a trailer behind the car with all of our belongings.  Many household items had to be sold; and yes, my desk had...

by Katie Hanzeli I’m sure you’ve heard more than you want of pandemic news.  That said, see my previous blog .  Did anyone note the timing of my missing marriage record?  Actually, I may not have given it, a huge oversight on my part!  Miscellaneous records pinpoint the date to somewhere between September 1918 and August 1919. What happened during that time?  You guessed it - the Spanish ‘Flu Pandemic, which was caused by the H1N1 influenza virus, which also caused problems in 2009.  They called it  the “grippe” in 1918 and the “Swine ‘Flu” in 2009.  We are encouraged to not just gather dates and hard facts about events in our ancestors’ lives.  We should be understanding the times and places in which they lived.  For me and my marriage record, that means understanding the impact of the Spanish ‘Flu Pandemic on the citizens of Boston, which is where it appears the marriage took place. Here are some of the basic...

Some very cool new features of genealogy websites and mobile apps were introduced at RootsTech.  FamilySearch Isabella Rogers, ready to add to tree FamilySearch Unfinished Attachments  is available both on the FamilySearch Family Tree and on the FamilySearch mobile app. Read more about it at  https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/familysearch-unfinished-attachments/ . Try it out and maybe this will happen for you: I made a great discovery when I found a census record in an unfinished attachment for my great-grandmother. Once I opened the record, I saw her sister’s name on the census and added her to the family tree. No one in the family had known she existed. Now she is on the family tree and with the right family. Map My Ancestors   Map My Ancestors for the mobile app:  https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/whats-map-ancestors/ This is pure joy and only available for your phone or tablet. It is thrilling to see all the work you and...

Was Sampson Caudill (1784 – 1863) the father of Hugh Caudle(1812--1859)? Genealogists and family historians have long speculated about the identity of the father of Hugh Caudle (1812 – 1859).   Clayton Cox, the genealogist and long-time authority on the Caudill family, never provided an answer. [1] An article in Cordell Clippings , the newsletter of the Cordell Family Association (now inactive) No.10, January 1994, may be the source of the many assertions that Hugh was the son of Sampson Caudle. [2] The Caudills (Caudles, Caddells, Coddles, Cordels, Codills, and many other spellings) are a large and well-documented family.   The first documentation of a Caudle in America is a Virginia Land Grant to Stephen “Cawdle” from King George of England in 1731. [3] By the time of the Revolutionary War, the family had migrated to North Carolina. [4] The family had begun migrating to eastern Kentucky by 1789. [5] TRACKING THE MIGRATION OF TWO FAMILIES In 1820, Sa...

Weekly Armenian, October 9, 2019 When Alex stopped by the Burien Library GenHelp desk last October, he was very excited to share his news.   Just a few days earlier it had been announced that a city park in Yerevan, Armenia, was being named to honor his great grandmother, Diana Agabeg Apcar. In commemoration of Woman’s History Month in March, here is her powerful story. Diana Agabeg Apcar, a widow with young children and a business to operate in Yokohama, Japan, was very concerned for the welfare of Armenians, her ancestral people.   She rescued refugees from the Armenian Genocide of 1915, arranging transportation to Yokohama, Japan, housing them and arranging their immigration to the United States.   A child of the Diaspora, she had never set foot in Armenia but she was deeply committed to church and her people. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, many small countries gained their independence but ther...