​With the extreme heat, smoke, and humidity this week, I’ve had no excuse to put off gathering research and analyzing the information.  I’m particularly interested in finding my ancestor’s mother’s death record.  This record has eluded me and so I’ve turned to researching my ancestor’s siblings and families in space and time.  I know that the parent didn’t travel to the United States, so the mystery lies with her children and grandchildren.  By finding more information about them, I hope to find where this mystery lady is in space and time.

A recent trip to Minneapolis made me appreciate the less busy highways of my region.  With summer construction and more travelers, it was certainly a challenge navigating these roads.  It made me wonder about the travels and possible vacations of my ancestors.  Depending on where they lived and their social-economic status there were likely some trips to visit relatives or other states.  Some may have ventured back across the ocean to the homeland.  Let’s look at ways to find this information.

Do you spend time laser-focused on a specific branch of your family?  An individual?  Or perhaps you hop from ancestor to another as the spirit takes you? All of these are fine if you are capturing the source information so that six months, ten years or more you or a descendant will know where you got your information.  Let’s look at revisiting our research.

Wishing you all a very Happy 4th of July!  Enjoy time with family and friends and the warm days of summer!  Perhaps you'll have new stories to share in your family history!
​4th of July Facts and History—July 4 Fun Facts (parade.com)

​During the pandemic there have been some dedicated souls who have been recording and capturing burial information for their local cemeteries.  I remember when this effort was done many years ago by local historical societies.  Those efforts were published in books.  Now the results of these dedicated hours are published on websites and popular sites like FindAGrave and Billions of Graves.  Let’s look at our options for finding family history research in cemetery records.

​There’s something satisfying about finding the passenger list/ship record of the arrival of our ancestors to America.  It provides that critical connection between the old and new country.  Over the years it has become easier to find ancestors on ship records that were delivered by the ship’s captain when they reached port here in the United States and Canada.  We’ve talked about many resources in past blogs, and I thought today we could delve into Castle Garden.  Let’s look.

​As mentioned in past Blogs, I’ve been on a mission to scan, label and update my family history photos for myself and future generations.  There are several websites that delve into tools as well as magazine articles that we can explore.  This week we’ll check out Vivid-Pix RESTORE to see if this photo editing tool will work for you.  Let’s look.

Recently I’ve been searching for additional information about one of my family branches.  My default search engine is Microsoft’s Bing.  Usually, I’m happy with the search results but sometimes I cannot find a site that I’ve seen before (and forgot to bookmark or save to favorites.)  This has reminded me that I should be leveraging other tools to see what else is out there.  Each database search result is slightly different.  Let’s look.

​Memorial Day and the start of summer officially begins.  This week has felt a bit more like fall in my part of the world but soon the heat will return.  While Memorial Day has become a long weekend for most, we need to pause to remember those who have made it possible for us to enjoy our freedom to spend time with family and friends.
 
The History Channel has a nice article of about Memorial Day and how it started: Memorial Day 2021: Facts, Meaning & Traditions - HISTORY.  
 
However, you spend the holiday weekend, I hope that you can spend time remembering those ancestors who came before and served in the military.  We owe them a great debt.  Happy Memorial Day!

We are approaching summer and soon Memorial Day Weekend.  As you research your ancestors who served in the military, there is an interesting resource that you might want to check out:  National Soldiers Homes.  These homes often started shortly after the Civil War when many wounded veterans needed additional care. Let’s look.