Category: Uncategorized

Just wanted to take a minute to post this

On Wednesday, I posted about the things I’d learned from the first half of my 7 day free trial with Footnote.com. I spent all week getting up early and scouring their records so I could really get the most out of my free trial. I kept notes in a draft here, so that I could post the recap halfway through (It was honestly my plan all along). It really was a great experience! There was an overwhelming response from that post. I’m so glad that people found it informative or entertaining in some way. I have a lot of fun rambling about all my ‘misadventures’ on this blog.

Yesterday afternoon I was informed I’d been given a complimentary membership to Footnote.com for one year! You can’t imagine how it made my day! I am so grateful for their kindness. I never would have been able to afford keeping the membership. I certainly wasn’t expecting anything out of my post, I just wanted people to see how much you can learn from the kind of records I was finding. Some records don’t seem like they can be helpful, like city directories, but they can make all the difference in the world if you know how to utilize them.

So thank you to Footnote.com for making my week so memorable and giving this girl a wonderful gift! I wasn’t going to post about Footnote.com’s generosity but I think they deserve a shoutout for their kindness. So often kindness goes unrewarded in this world, and I always try and let people know when they’ve done something that I really appreciate. Don’t worry about me wasting my year though, I spent half my lazy Friday reading old Chicago newspapers and playing around with the features of the website!

Today is one of those days where I’m really glad I have a blog category called Family File Hijinks. It makes it all sound more interesting than what it actually is. I’m writing today to update about my progress in two areas. One being my family file clean up and two on the new website progress.

Continue reading “Updates on my Progress” →

My Purpose

1. My main purpose in doing genealogy is just to learn more about where I come from. It sounds like every other reason in the world, but before I started doing genealogy I knew next to nothing about my family. We live so far from the rest of the family, that I’ve never had constant contact with anyone but my parents and siblings. All other family, I only see once a year if I’m lucky. So doing genealogy has helped me discover why I am the way I am. Why I love Ireland so much, my love of forms and bookkeeping, things people probably don’t question in their lives.

My Primary Goal

1. I think my primary goal is just to ‘collect’ relatives. I don’t have a particular need or want to do this professionally. I don’t have any grand ideas of being related to royalty. I just kind of like collecting relatives. In fact, when I first started, I collected all kinds of people. I would research just to research. When I cleaned out my file a few years ago, I removed over 100 people that had no blood relationship to me but were distant relatives of people who married into my family.

Continue reading “Overall Goals and Purpose” →

I’m celebrating today. Not only is my new site design almost finished, but I’m just about a quarter of the way through re-working my family file. I hit 200 people today and I’m finishing up the Love/Menzies line today. I’m excited to get the Surname Saturday: Love post written up, so I’ll start that as soon as I finish today. After I finish that, I’ll be done with my Grandpa Moore’s side of the family and it’ll be onto the Redford side of the family. That side isn’t very big yet, so really I’m almost half done. It won’t take me long to rework that section. Then it’s no turning back until I verify Grandma Taylor’s family tree once and for all!

Thomas MacEntee over at GeneaBloggers started a new meme today. This is meant to help everyone know what kind of technologies are out there to aid in Genealogy research. Here’s my list.

Continue reading “What I Do and What I Use” →

It’s been so busy around here this week. My Aunts and their husbands visited for the first time in like 30 years this weekend. So we were busy cooking, catching up, cooking, and revisiting some old haunts. It was definitely a great visit. I’m getting much better at prying information from people. Don’t worry, there was no harm done, but sometimes you just have to steer that conversation back around to why Grandpa’s family practically disowned him. It’s just vital to my getting to sleep at night. Many things my Aunt told me, she said if I ever published before she died, she’d haunt me forever. Yikes!

We definitely have a project we’re working on though. Our own family cookbook. We have a very basic binder in the shed we can use. Everyone is going to send me some recipes for it. The ones that don’t, well I’ll just bug them until they do. The idea came about when I was showing them the Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant Cookbook that I wrote about earlier. Both of them loved it so much they immediately had me order them both a copy. They should have them by next week, if not the end of this week. So that’s something we’ll be working on, and we hope to finish putting at least a first copy together by Christmas. We’ll see how things go!

Unfortunately, because my Ohio Aunts were coming, I had to miss my annual New York Moore Reunion. My dad and siblings went, but I stayed in Maryland to help Mom with the company. I don’t regret it! I did miss not seeing everyone but I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot of family stories when everyone was cutting loose. Now all I have to do is log them in One Note before I forget all the who, what, when, wheres.

I’ll keep everyone informed about how the Recipe book is coming!

I’m still chugging along on my website. Right now I’m putting up my sources on the Doremus family. Re-visiting this family reminds me of some of my old contacts. These were made between me, my mother, and Aunt Diane many many moons ago. Mom and I were using email addresses provided by our Internet Provider at the time. Then they folded up pretty quickly and we switched to cable internet. After that I took a break from my genealogy as I was going to college and working full time. I’ve lost contact with many of these people. It makes me sad to think about that as it’s my Dad’s side of the family that these contacts were made from.

Going through RootsWeb, I actually ran across some emails that were exchanged all those years ago. July 7, 2002 to be exact. Gosh I’m jealous of other people’s organization and thought for sources at the time. I still remember where I got most things but I didn’t source at the time, keeping everything in my own memory. That was so bad of me. I’m regretting it now. I know it’s a common mistake by new researchers. I just beat myself up about it though. More and more as I go through this clean up process now.

Going into my Local Family History Center just really put it all into perspective for me. Did I find anything out new? Not really. I did realize I have to stop taking such a casual stance on everything. I need to keep a research diary, I need to log my correspondence, not just stick it in a genealogy folder after I’ve responded. Have I even responded to some of those? I don’t know because I’m not organized!

So this post is a shout out to all you organized, experienced researchers who are such an inspiration to beginners like me. I’m not a complete beginner sure, but in many ways I still am and always will be. I love the learning process so much, and I appreciate all that I’ve learned in just the short time I’ve been blogging. Now I just need to overcome my social anxiety and comment on the blogs I’m reading and let those who are inspiring me know!

♥♥♥

Folks, I am not prepared for a trip to the Family History Center in town. I’m going to do it anyway. My mom’s co-worker is actually an LDS Church Member and he’s said he’ll take us in and introduce us around and help us get situated with the place.

My first reaction was panic. I’m not ready for that kind of information influx you know! Then I realized I’ll NEVER be ready up to my standards, so I’m going in with both eyes wide open and maybe my camera to document the experience. I found I do love to take pictures, even if I don’t know how to take good ones yet. ^.^

The annual Moore Family Reunion is set and coming up fast on July 4th. Maybe I’ll bring back another box of information. I think there is only one more, but I don’t know. I do know I had Llewellyn’s birth certificate and maybe even death certificate at some point and I don’t now. So that’s got to be at least one box of documents. I cringe at how many photos could still be left. Oy!

There are two things I’m trying to focus on right now:

1. Getting the website back up to what it was before it was hacked and I deleted all those un-verified people. I feel like the site is empty now, so I really need to get things back up and sourced properly there.
2. Preparing a to do list (a list within a list, that could get weird) for going to the LDS Family History Center in town. I can probably spend a ton of time there over the summer if I play my cards right. I just want to try and spend my time efficiently.

So that’s what I’m up to right now. Hopefully I don’t overwhelm myself. 🙂