This Blog will be on pause for a few weeks due to family health. In the meantime, please check out past blogs by viewing the Blog Topics section.  Happy Researching and Writing!

​I was excited to learn that France’s “Tables of Successions and Absences, 1890-1970” has been made available on MyHeritage. I have used these tables in a particular region but it is a time-intensive process. Let’s look at these records.

​Have you thought about capturing medical history for your ancestors? A cousin recently contacted me to ask about our family’s medical history…cancer occurrence within our aunts, uncles, and cousins.  As I was compiling a list, it made me think how this disease impacted so many lives.  As medicine advances, more people can beat the odds, but it is still a dreaded disease.  As genealogists, we seem to be the keepers of family information, including those related to illnesses and death.  Let’s look at ways that we can capture this information for others.

​Fall! It’s that time of the year where school starts and I start thinking about ways to hone my genealogy skills. If you are near the Fargo-Moorhead area, you too have an opportunity to gain more knowledge. The annual Family History Workshop 2024 is slated for September 21, 2024. If you register by September 15th, your lunch is included in the reasonable price of $49 for a day of family history learning. This year the featured speaker is Dana Kelly, the Executive Director of the Norwegian American Cultural Center & Naeseth Library. The focus this year is on Scandinavian countries but there are additional speakers on a variety of topics. Check here to learn more.
It is great to keep building our skills. No matter the topic, there are great opportunities to learn. Happy Learning!

We tend to celebrate everything in the twenty-first century, including birthdays and anniversaries. Friends are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary soon and I wondered how and if our ancestors celebrated these milestones. Let’s look.

​It seems like we were in the middle of summer and now it is back to school and Labor Day Weekend!  I hope you have a great time with your family and friends with this holiday that marks the end of summer and the beginning of fall. For those who like to read more about it, here’s an article: Labor Day - Wikipedia
Happy Labor Day 2024!

I’ve been busy working on that family albums and have almost completed my update of information and photos. One of the positives of this time-consuming but rewarding effort is that I identified information that I would like to add to my collateral relative information. Also tied to this was the importance of organization and identifying family photos and artifacts. I can tell I have more work ahead. Let’s look at ideas for tackling these kinds of projects.

We all have them. Brick walls in our family research. Brick walls  come in all shapes and forms, from tiny garden fences for small missing pieces of our ancestors’ lives to giant brick walls that tower over our heads. There are resources to help us think of new ways to climb or go around those walls. Let’s look.

I haven’t talked about much about using AI for genealogy and perhaps we’ll delve more into that another time. In some ways we are already using AI with search engines and other tools. FamilySearch has an AI Experiment that you can try. Let’s look.

​I realize that most of my blogs are focused on researching and fleshing out information to help you write your family story. However, we all need inspiration in helping us do the actual writing. Let’s look at some writing tools and great sites/blogs that can help.