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Posts about researching family history

Who Should I Write About This Week?

As we are over 200 Family History posts and nearly 4 years in the blog, I thought I might share a little insight on the software I use and how it helps me to determine who to write about.

Christmas Letters and Family History

Hope our US readers had a good Thanksgiving! Once Thanksgiving is over, most people turn their thoughts to the next holiday. And there are bunches in the next few weeks, Chanukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa among others. So what does this have to do with family history? Obviously there are many traditions, like the cookies we talked about last year.

What do degrees have to do with family research?

While I was working on the post about cousins, Walt and I were discussing other means of expressing relationships between related individuals. We were looking at some charts and they had a notation for Civil Degree and Canon Degree. What does that actually mean?

Which cousin is that? First, once removed?

When you are doing family research, it can be tricky to track all of the relationships. I thought it might be helpful to explain what some of the relationship descriptors actually mean. My software helps me sort it all out, but it’s not too complicated if you know where to start.

A Follow Up on Howdy Neighbor – How to Find a Location

Last week, I posted about finding that a large number of relatives were from a smallish area in Germany. I had some requests from people who wanted to know where their relatives were from. So here are some tips you can use to try to find out.

Howdy neighbor! Where are you from?

When we were working on last week’s post about Henry and Anna Vonderhaar, I was interested to note that their parents had all immigrated at about the same time. I started looking at where they were from and discovered it was very likely they knew each other before they moved to Iowa. They were all from the area near Ankum, Germany.

Keeping track of the actual photographs

I’ve talked in a couple of previous posts about the challenges of keeping track of all the information and the photographs that we have for our family history. My post about the photographs covered the digital side of organizing. Now we needed to come up with a storage and organizing solution for the actual photographs.

Celebrating an anniversary of really shirttail relations

Sometimes it is easy to dive way, way too deep into the family history research. We’ve talked about shirt tail relations in a couple of other posts – here and here. Well, I think we may have found one of the most shirttail relations on the tree.

So who did Rhoda Hole marry?

In last week’s family history post, I talked about a relationship mix up for one of Walt’s great-great aunts. We had originally thought Rhoda had married a man named John Christy. Turns out that was another Rhoda Hole. So now we had to figure out who our Rhoda Hole had married.

A good idea shot down with facts

I had originally planned to write about the anniversary of one of Walt’s great-great aunts, Rhoda Hole. Our information had her marrying John Christy on January 13, 1861. But it turned out not to be the case.

The family information we had told us that she was John Swisher Hole’s younger sister, born in 1846. The notes also mentioned that she had been married twice, the second time to someone with the last name of Monroe, but that was all the information we had.

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