Are you looking for a way to involve youth in family history?  Do you live or work near a cemetery?  Do you know any Boy Scouts nearing an Eagle Project?  Have I got a project for you! One recent Saturday morning my neighbor, Tami Madsen, and her 15 year old son, Chris, knocked on my [...]

Have you ever gone to a cemetery for your immigrant ancestor’s tombstone, didn’t find it, and gave up and left? Gordon Remington, a professional genealogist, tells of the time he was doing some research in upstate New York looking for a place of birth for an immigrant who died in New York. Gordon went to [...]

Have you ever visited an ancestor’s grave and wished you had more information about the ancestor rather than just the name and dates on the tombstone? Wouldn’t you love to be able to hear how other people felt about him and get insight into his personality?  I would! The makers of the Memory Medallion have [...]

Ancestors keeping you up at night?  How about checking out a cemetery while you’re still in your pj’s and slippers?   The Internet is bringing us more graves and tombstone transcriptions every day. Here’s a few sites worth checking: Find A Grave is a free database 68 million grave records.  This database grows daily as people [...]

Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?  Grant, of course, plus his wife, Julia (Dent) Grant.  Who’s buried in Lincoln’s tomb?  Lincoln, plus his wife, Mary (Todd) Lincoln, and three of their four sons.  Who is buried near Thomas Francis Farrell in Salem, Massachusetts?  His wife, Sarah T. Farrell, and sons Thomas F. Farrell Jr., and J. [...]

I know it’s happened to you.  You’ve done all your research and headed to a spot to find your ancestor, only to discover what you thought would be there wasn’t there at all.  It’s happened to me. Bruce and I were in Levis, Quebec, searching for a burial place for Glossop McQuire who died there [...]

Have you ever had a time when you only had minutes to search for something, so little time it seemed almost futile to try, yet within those minutes you found what you were looking for? It happens to me sometimes,  usually in the last hour of a full week of researching.  One of those times [...]