Climbing My Family Tree

Gotta love in-laws.

One hundred years ago this month, my late father-in-law arrived back in the United States after touring Europe as a piano player for a "American college jazz band."

My husband's maternal grandmother, Floyda Mabel Steiner McClure (1878-1948), was an expert with a needle.

This was a very sorrowful day in 1981.

Last post in this series!

It was mid-afternoon in Rome, Italy on September 11, 2001 when dramatic scenes captured by CNN broke into regular afternoon programming.

This is the fourth entry in my series of posts about getting a military veteran's experience into the US Library of Congress.

This post looks at plans to record an interview for the Library of Congress's Veterans Oral History Project.

If you want to have a veteran's story accepted into the US Library of Congress's Veterans History Project, this series will walk you through the steps.

This summer, I helped to plan my husband's participation in the US Library of Congress's Veterans History Project.

OTD in 2008, I began blogging about family history.

My husband and I began our journey of curating our family history collection in 2013.

My Dad, Harold D.

OTD in 1867, Train Caldwell McClure (1843-1934) married Gulia Swain (1847-1920).

Last year, Ancestry announced "Smart Search" in beta, intended to be a more intuitive search form with "enhanced logic" for focusing on more relevant results.

My Mom, Daisy Schwartz Burk (1919-1981), was born a few minutes after her twin sister, Dorothy Schwartz (1919-2001).

Inspired by Linda Stufflebean's recent blog post about captioning and donating old school class photos, I checked with my Sis about the possibility of donating our elementary school class photos and our mother's old school stuff.

John Nelson (1825-1907), a distant ancestor of my husband, was among the brave "Iron Men" of the Indiana 44th Regiment fighting at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, during the US Civil War.

ChatGPT has better artistic skills than I do, so I asked it to do the following: Create an image titled "unsourced family trees = genealogy slop" with a stylized family tree and random genealogy words in a slop whirlwind.

In 2013, I created ancestor landing pages on this genealogy blog to summarize what I've written about specific ancestor families.

I've long been a fan of Genealogical.com's "At a Glance" four-page, laminated guides to genealogy research in specific places or about specific cultures.

Paul Chiddicks recently wrote an insightful post about separating truth from error on official documents like birth, marriage, and death certificates.

On this day in 1863, my husband's 1c3r answered the call to enlist in the Indiana "minute men" Infantry and prepare to defend against attack from Confederate forces during the US Civil War.

This summer, I've been helping my neighbor learn more about her ancestors, particularly her father's family history.

Here's a new Ancestry feature I'm exploring: Tree Compare, now in beta.

Celebrating Independence Day and America 250 with this penny postal greeting sent to my husband's family in Cleveland, Ohio, 119 years ago today.

Three special events took place on the Fourth of July in my and my husband's combined family tree: Samuel Schwartz (1883-1954), my maternal great uncle, was born on July 4th in what was Ungvar, Hungary (now Uzhhorod, Ukraine).

In my father's family tree, when Vilna-born merchant Samuel Markell (1885-1971) married Boston-born Marion Goldstein (1885-1961) in Revere, Massachusetts in 1911, the new bride took her husband's surname--and also his nationality.

Putting together this most recent bite-sized family history project, Sis and I had an abundance of photos and ideas.

In June of 1906, my maternal great-grandfather became a naturalized American citizen in US District Court, Brooklyn, New York.