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 […]
Downsizing is always tough. Getting rid of paper is tough. Scanning is preserving some of it. I am gradually doing this and printed words from the past that I find bring joy, sadness, and laughter. A marriage license, report cards, greeting cards with special messages, poetry someone wrote for me, photos from high school, notes […]
Yellow. That was my Mom’s favorite color. Today would have been her 89th birthday. I grew up in a yellow house with a yellow fence. I helped repaint that house and fence many times. When I was a child she even had a yellow convertible. She had a favorite yellow suit. I remember other yellow […]
Umlaut: a mark placed over the top of a vowel to indicate a specific pronunciation. I see the use of umlauts in my Swedish and German research. Minnesota Department of Transportation sign rules meant the lack of the umlaut over the “o” for a sign in the town of Lindström, Minnesota. This caused a furor […]