All My Ancestors

Last week I taught a beginner’s class on research African American ancestors. As part of the prep, I ordered and read Thulani Davis’ My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-first Freedwoman Confronts Her Roots.
I recommend it. It was fascinating to follow her as she unravelled and verified the story her grandmother Georgia was writing about [...]

Here are Miriam’s prompts for this week. I guess I’m not really late if we consider that George Washington’s birthday isn’t until Friday–we just celebrated last Monday, supposedly.
*As a child, do you remember celebrating either Lincoln or Washington’s birthdays? How did you celebrate them? What do you remember learning about either of these [...]

Lidian at The Virtual Dime Museum blog tagged me for the meme currently making the rounds.  In my quest to find fresh topics to write about by using other blogger’s suggestions, I decided I’d participate.  In one of my lives, I’m a librarian, which doesn’t make me an expert–just makes me nervous about committing.  [...]

I found this article in the 4 January 1935 McAlester, Oklahoma newspaper, of course, while looking for something else. That this couple, James Mills and Sarah Keifer, had gotten married in a Civil War army camp piqued my interest. Seventy years married is a lot of years! There is a lot of [...]

I’ve always heard of genealogists finding their family while searching for something else. In my 25 years, plus or minus, of searching this has never happened to me.
But yesterday it did!
I was researching a family that was in Vinita, Indian Territory, very early. (For Oklahoma, that means prior to statehood in 1907, which, [...]

I found this letter my granddad wrote in 1918 among all the “stuff” we moved after his death in 1998. Based on the date of the letter, he would have been 9 when he wrote it. I don’t know who Ray was that he was writing it to, nor do I know if [...]

OK, I’ve been wrestling with Blurb.
I do think they have lovely products–I just hope I can get there.
The application is very verrrrrrry slow–and I read on one of the their forums to be sure and NOT cut and paste directly from Word.  Evidently, one should paste what’s in Word into Notebook, or something similar, and [...]