A Family Tapestry

  Two weeks shy of an exact twenty one years after Effie Woodworth sent her grandson a letter lecturing him on his lack of respect for a fa...

  Kids can get so embarrassed by anything that makes them seem different than their friends. In the case of Marilyn Sowle Bean's husband...

  Have you ever written a letter to family, only to find it returning to you, years afterwards? That's what just happened to me. Yesterd...

  It was a "giving back" project which started me on a path of finding "orphan" photos and putting family history resear...

  ...there may still be a way. Yesterday , we were puzzling over why Maude Woodworth Bean 's paternal grandmother, Eliza Smith, would ha...

  Surnames can have a "Goldilocks" syndrome of their own. When they are too rare, it's hard to find enough records to facilita...

  Sometimes, it takes building someone else's tree before you can get down to the business of building your own. Right now, I'm raci...

  If you stumbled upon the given name Mariet in your family history wanderings, and thought maybe, just maybe, that might be a hint to look ...

  Pinning one's research hopes upon the life events of one solitary person can become disappointing. Take the case of our Maude Woodwort...

  Why can't archived newspaper collections contain the complete holdings of a given newspaper? What's up with gaps in publication da...

  Our task, as family historians, is to push back ever so tentatively through the years from where our known ancestors used to live to their...

  Sometimes, it takes a leap of faith to connect the dots between generations—or a little guess work followed by thorough research and a lot...

  The early wars in American history, whether Revolutionary War, War of 1812, or the much later Civil War, may have pointed to one detail he...

  Some research tasks may seem rather perfunctory, especially the deeper we genealogists dig into the documentation. On the contrary, in the...

  Every so often, tracing the trajectory of an ancestor's life story leads us straight into the midst of conflict—the kind of conflict w...

  Sometimes, family history research takes the form of speed searching. That certainly was the case when I took a whirlwind tour through the...

  It may have been a stash of family photographs found in a local antique shop which prompted me to tell the story of their previous owner,...