Today I drove past 486 So. Hamline Avenue in Saint Paul and smiled up at the corner apartment. I had to do that today because it’s Grandma’s birthday. Great Grandma Gert, Dirty Gerty, Granny Grapefruit, and just Grandma. Those were all names of love. More on her names another time. She would have been 118 […]
My ancestry is truly a mixture of immigrants. My ancestors came to the U.S. from eight (8!) other countries. I am so honored to be their descendant. They came to the United States from: Canada Denmark England France Germany Ireland Scotland Sweden DNA testing has shown that some of their ancestors had roots from other […]
As you may have read before, my Great Granduncle Louis F. Slaker worked for the “Omaha” railroad. The Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Omaha Railway was later part of the Chicago and North Western Railway system. In his position as a Superintendent, one of his tasks was naming a railroad station in Mendota (Dakota County), […]
This afternoon I set aside a couple hours for my own research. I rechecked a specific database on Ancestry.com, U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925. Once again, I searched all my ancestral and collateral surnames from that time period. Whose passport did I find? Nobody’s. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. Nil. Zero. I know that passports were not required […]
Lyfmap is now LIVE and open to the public! What is this Lyfmap? If you have a connection to Saint Paul, Minnesota take a look at Lyfmap.com. a fantastic new way to preserve memories, history, and photos. Register and add your own. Imagine being able to save all your memories at the actual locations where […]
Browsing through some midwestern and plains states items on CyndisList tonight, I came across a website I didn’t know about. The site is Digital Horizons: Life On the Northern Plains. The site’s home page says “Digital Horizons is an online treasure house of thousands of images, documents, video, and oral histories depicting life on the […]
My bookshelves hold several books on oral history. One of my favorites is My Backyard History Book. It was published in 1975 and is out of print but it often shows up on used book websites. It is written for children and for some reason it always spoke to me. (Please no joking about my […]
My FTDNA ethnic makeup is not all that different from that on AncestryDNA as shown in the preceding post except that FTDNA doesn’t show my Danish and Swedish roots. My oldest son’s ethnic makeup is 100% European and does show some Scandinavian. On Ancestry I have 7% Iberian Peninsula and this FTDNA maps shows that […]
I have done DNA testing with Ancestry.com and FamilyTreeDNA. These show I am more Irish than anything. That’s not a surprise. I know that these estimates could change as the number of people tested grows. I have a bombed ancestral church, a church that neglected to keep records for a number of years, and some […]
The 700 acre Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California, is joining in on saving water. According to an article in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Rose Hills once required 293 million gallons of potable water a year, as much used in several cities. The article further states: “On Wednesday, the cemetery put an end […]