Flickr:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ We all knew how to do this as kids. Even once we started in school, there were summer vacations, and most of us -- at least the lucky ones -- played and did our chores without needing much direction. However, as we matured, the thoughts of jobs, careers, supporting ourselves, beginning families, created a structure that for many, left little feeling of creativity and freedom. In truth, the decisions we made in the past steered us to this moment, reading this post! Charter Members Forty years ago, folks in the south King County area, tired of driving across the lake, took the courageous step of creating the South King County Genealogical Society. Some of these wonderful people are still with us:  William L. Adams, Judith Dempsey Aeschliman, Margaret Oakley Alder, Lillian Wanamaker Anderson, Clemence Rhea Baker, John Baker, Mary Kitchell Baker, Elva Barber, Patsy Barber, Marilyn Bell, Peggy Bentz, CarolLe Stratton Berry, Laura Anderso

  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

Do you remember 40 years ago? Our SKCGS newsletter does!    South King County Genealogical Society Newsletter, V. 1, No. 1 Above is the top of Volume 1, Number 1 of the Newsletter, which later became SoKingNews. Thank you to Katie Hanzeli who scanned these newsletters from her own collection, Rich Thayer who kept our digital files safe, Michele Mattoon who uploaded them, and Tina Lawson who has been getting them onto our website .  SKCGS incorporated in September 1984  and put out the first newsletter one year later. Amazing to look at that old tech - remember typing  mimeograph "masters?" not a fun job.  What fun that they were celebrating their first picnic!  We've been searching for creative ways to celebrate our 40th anniversary, and a picnic this summer would be lovely. We just need someone to volunteer to organize it.  You can see MaryLynn's contribution of the top image in this post, and in our new blog header, at  https://skcgs.blogspot.com/ .  Ten years late

Generated with AI (Microsoft Bing Image Creator) ∙ January 7, 2024 at 12:54 PM Jones Family Tree: Sanford Talbert Jones and Ethelyn Stephens At the end of 2023, I had a wonderful surprise and wrote about it here: Piggy-back . Antoinette has been generous, sharing family photos and history, which really led to breakthroughs in my son-in-law Jason's tree. Researching families outside of my "own" has been enriching, and I learned so much researching the family of  Ethelyn Stephens, Jason's great-grandmother. She married Sanford Talbert Jones the first, who was a laborer for the City of Los Angeles at the end of his life. To the right is a part of a photo of their son Sanford II (in the middle) in an old fire truck, from a great article about Black firefighters in Los Angeles. [1]  Sanford Talbert Jones II and Ruby Alexander Sanford carried on his father's experience in working for LA city. He  married Ruby Alexander who was born in Louisiana, possibly in New Orleans

  image credit: bunditinay -stock.adobe.com My 2024 Genealogy Resolutions For many people, year-end is a time of reflection on the past year and looking ahead to how we hope the next year will unfold. As I have worked on my genealogy development activities for my Kinship Determination Project during the past few days, I have thought about how I can be more effective going forward. Making genealogy resolutions for 2024 is a result of that thought. First: I will write a Research Plan for each project or new phase of a project. No longer will I just dive into acquiring names, dates, or facts in a haphazard fashion, hoping to emerge with a finished Research Report. (More on that later.) Second: I will create a complete citation for every date, fact, or other piece of information that is not general knowledge when I find it. I will not allow myself to think, “Oh, I’ll remember where I saw that.” Third: I will consult the original record whenever I can possibly find it. An abstract or transc

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons In this season of celebration, I would like to celebrate piggy-back riding. We all do it, whether we know it or not! Every time we use a genealogy website with "hints," those hints are based on the work that other researchers have done, connecting images and records to families and individuals. Search algorithms are written by programmers who may know nothing about quality genealogical research, but do know how to code search parameters that will yield good results for us.  The image of riding piggy-back, or giving others a ride, perhaps came so strongly to mind this week, because out of the blue, I got an email from a researcher, Antoinette, who found one of the profiles I worked on years ago, in the family of my son-in-law Jason. His 2nd-great-grandmother, Martha Caroline Carter, was born in February 1856 in Wayne County, Missouri, and died after 1910 probably in Colorado.  The email revealed that Antoinette is descended from Martha's sister A

Winona Hahn Laird, SKCGS Volunteer of the Year Winona Hahn Laird is our Volunteer of the Year 2023. The Washington State Genealogical Society asks each member society to select one volunteer or team to honor, and in 2023 Winona was chosen unanimously by the South King County Genealogical Society Board.  ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ How it Started Winona has been doing genealogy for over 60 years.  She started as a young girl in a church class. One of the projects was to get her mother, father, and grandparents to write a one-page story of their lives and they all wrote their stories.  Some years later, after Winona’s grandmother had passed, the family found reams of paper among her possessions which contained notes and stories she had written. Winona used this information to write and publish a book about her grandmother,  "Have You Ever Lived in a Mining Town;" see on Amazon or her website store . Winona has researched most of her family lines back to the 16th and 17th centuries.  Marri