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The Case of the Mysterious Birth Certificate: Part Two

Please read the original post first, here. This makes my head spin and it is beyond belief. This is why we stumble down rabbit holes and sometimes end up in a truly Alice in Wonderland experience. This is an unbelievable outcome and I still do not have the answer to my original question, but where […]

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On What We Leave Behind: Writing

A kind thank you to writer Paul Chiddicks who inspired this post. My grandfather Milo Dean Mosier was a writer and I often find myself writing about him, for of all of my ancestors, I know more about his life, how he felt, and what moved him; precisely because he left behind a written record. […]

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Organizing Your Genealogy: How I do it

Just this morning I read a Genealogy Tweet that got me thinking about how I organize my Genealogy. The author mentioned putting all their Birth, Deaths and Marriages into a binder in archival sleeves. Yay for archival sleeves, I have been using them for at least 20 years. However, reading that the BMD’s were all […]

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Genealogy Challenge: Ancestor Scavenger Hunt

If you have been following me for any amount of time you will note my posts tend to be “all over the map.” Here’s one that I dreamed up and haven’t even done myself so this post will be my own process. This is not a contest and one should not overthink this. Items You […]

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The Places You Go, the People You Meet

This post is prompted by the death of a fellow genealogist who died in June of 2020, of a non-Covid 19 related illness. I just recently found out that he had died. My last email to him was in August of 2020 to which I had no reply. I was not surprised at no response, […]

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A Trip Down Memory Lane: One way to access the stories of our past

Sometimes its a random thing that brings out old memories. Never underestimate what you can learn from a simply property search. A childhood best friend made a post about the price of the home she grew up in. I decided to follow suit and look up the house I grew up in. The house that […]

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Enslaved People in our Family Records: What We Can Do

This is a difficult topic and one I tend to delve into in search of my African ancestors and then pull up empty and run in another direction. But, I keep coming back again and again. For most of my life I had no idea I had any African kin. Here’s how the story goes…back […]

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The Case of the Missing Birth Certificate

Records are funny things. There are many caveats we must keep in mind when requesting and searching for birth certificates. My grandmother Carrie requested her birth certificate some time after she married my grandfather. Well that did not go well. She ended up having to provide sworn affidavits by people who were knowledgeable about her […]

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Confessions of a Rabbit Hole Genealogist: In Defense of Inspired Genealogy

This post has been brewing for at least a decade. It won’t be long that I will be celebrating a half century of pursuing genealogy. I have learned much over these many decades but still I feel guilt every time I read an article about how to do genealogy “properly.” What finally brought this to […]

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REFORMED GENEALOGISTS: Turning Trees into Stories

This sprang out of a 2015 Facebook post. Then I created a webpage in 2020 but for those who haven’t seen it, here goes. A REFORMED GENEALOGIST is one who has moved from filling in their Family Tree—-to making the tree bloom through the telling of its family stories. A Reformed genealogist pledges to make […]

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