Author Louise Barry examines both sides of the family story in this award-winning case study.
Editor’s Note: This article took first place in the 2001 International Society of Family History Writers and Editors (ISFHWE) writing contest for the case study category.
My family holds regular family reunions. At some point during every reunion, we take the time to honor our ancestors by learning something new about our family’s heritage. During our last reunion, a fierce rainstorm forced us indoors during the afternoon’s activities.
The Internet can be valuable property, and protecting it is getting complicated. Here’s how you can help.
I have fat fingers so I tend to make frequent finger fumbles while keyboarding. Ten fingers versus a QWERTY keyboard with over 100 keys is hardly a fair contest, and my typing tends to come out the worse for it. In days of yore, such mistakes were called typos, or typographical errors.
What does HisGen have to offer family historians?
Few organizations are as aptly suited to their names as the New England Historic Genealogical Society. It can be an unwieldy mouthful, but it has come to symbolize resources, collections, and a talent pool unrivaled by any other society focusing on New England research and, arguably, any other genealogical society in the country.
It’s easy to understand why researchers are advised to look for original records as sources of information for their family history. Compared to information from copies, abstracts, or summaries, the information in original records is less likely to have been changed, either accidentally or deliberately, in the process of being repeated or copied.
If your elusive ancestor was involved in a unique historical event, a lineage society might be the place to search for more information.
Some time ago, we were on a commuter flight from Portland, Maine, to New York City. The only available reading material was the airline magazine tucked into the seat-back pouch.
On 6 April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and officially entered the Great War. Six weeks later, on 18 May 1917, the Selective Service Act was passed, which authorized the president to increase the military establishment of the United States during the war.
Whether you go across the state or across the ocean, a visit to your ancestral hometown will yield information you never imagined.
Every year, my mother-in-law travels with her children and grandchildren to Vermont to visit the hometown of her paternal ancestors.
Who can possibly explain the feelings we get when we go back to the places where our ancestors lived and died? Whether your people made their home on a lonely prairie, a quiet farm, a remote mining camp, a sleepy town, or a bustling city, there’s something there that’s calling us back.
I have to confess that we never set out to build a village-based community. It was really an accident and an evolution, but over the last decade, a handful of like-minded and hard-working people helped me create a community based on the picturesque village of Osturna in present-day Slovakia. When it dawned on me what we had done, I looked around and realized that others were doing it, too.