Journal
138 articles on finding ancestors, reading records, and keeping the story with the evidence.
February 10, 2022 · Tracy Hall
I love to browse stories from newspapers. There is so much history in these newspapers that is not taught in schools any more. One such story I happened upon was during the Dust Bowl years. Having grown up in Illinois where we get plenty of rain, especially in the spring, and...
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February 10, 2022 · Tracy Hall
One of the blots on the United States is slavery. How do ancestors of slaves find their roots when there is so little information pre-1870? There are no passenger lists of the ships who brought the slaves to a far away land. They would never be naturalized, vote, own land, and...
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February 10, 2022 · Tracy Hall
One of my favorite things to do while we lived in the Midwest was to go to Irish festivals and Irish pubs. The music, the dancing, the singing, and the comradery. It was so much fun, and I always wondered what my ancestors did when they were in Ireland. Did they sing these sam...
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January 30, 2022 · Christopher Hall
Not that long ago, we wrote about our family history narratives in Family History as a Narrative and briefly in Family It’s What We Talk About . Not long ago I received a book from a friend. Our friend wrote a bit of her family history as a narrative in Over & Nether Compton S...
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January 30, 2022 · Christopher Hall
A while back our niece discovered a bit of an interest in family history. She knew we kept a family tree so she contacted us. She wanted to see it. We keep our primary tree in Ancestry.com. We also put it and other trees with other services such as FindMyPast.co.uk, MyHeritage...
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January 20, 2022 · Tracy Hall
While researching the other day I came across a new book that documents Maine’s original Acadian families. I had heard the term before but I wasn’t sure what exactly an Acadian was, and the reason for writing the book sounded intriguing. So off to do one of my favorite things,...
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January 10, 2022 · Tracy Hall
Did you have ancestors that left Ireland during the great migration years? Did any of them die on the voyage to a better opportunity? It is well known that the ships were not in good condition and many died on the trip to the new life they were hoping to start. This is why the...
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December 30, 2021 · Christopher Hall
Four days before my 32nd birthday my mother, 52, died suddenly. It was Monday. On the previous Friday she was cleaning up a property after a storm. She walked over a cistern when the cover gave way and she fell. She suffered a bruise on her thigh. She phoned her doctor who pro...
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December 20, 2021 · Tracy Hall
Do you ever get sentimental? Wish you knew more about your ancestors? Where exactly did they all live? How did they live? Why did they move so much? In general, were they happy, content, maybe even miserable? This summer while I was back home in Illinois, I had my aunt and mot...
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December 10, 2021 · Tracy Hall
Did you have ancestors that fought in World War II? Did any of them have stories that were heroic? Maybe they never talked about what happened. Maybe they were not supposed to talk about the things they did in case they endangered those who were part of helping. Here is one st...
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November 30, 2021 · Christopher Hall
Last month I reported about a chance opportunity we had to get closer to my ancestors at a cemetery on private land . It was a spur of the moment decision to make the stop, but we would not have even known the cemetery was nearby if we had not done a bit of preparation before...
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November 20, 2021 · Tracy Hall
World War II is known for many things, one of the more famous was "Tokyo Rose," a woman who spoke for one hour daily to the allied troops. She went by the name "Orphan Ann" but the American soldiers who looked forward to her show called her "Tokyo Rose." I don’t know about you...
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