Genealogy Stories, Halloween edition

Here it is, the premiere edition of the Genealogy Stories blog carnival.  There weren't as many entries as I hoped, but this is the first edition of the carnival.  So here goes...

Surname Saturday: Cafferty

It's still Saturday in my time zone, so I'm not late with this week's surname post yet.  We alternate back to my ancestral lines again this week with  on of my closer lines.  This week we'll look at my Cafferty ancestors, beginning with my great grandfather, Samuel Warren McCafferty.

October 2010 research trip report

Early in October, I made a genealogical research trip to central Illinois and eastern Indiana.  The goal of the trip was to view some pertinent records in a university archive and then to visit one of the family graveyards - after all, what better activity is there for the haunting month of October?
The short story is that the trip was a success.  Now to tell you the longer story...

Wordless Wednesday - Halloween edition

Surname Saturday: Benedict

We're back to a surname again of which I know only one person in our direct ancestry lines.  Today we'll look at my wife's sixth great grandmother, Hannah Benedict.  I did do some searching around this week and found her only in Ancetral File and in the one book that I mentioned recently about referencing.  Who is this mysterious woman?

A quick note on referencing

I'm slowly working my way through the Hand-book of Hartwell Genealogy, 1636-1887, this week adding a ton of information to my database and realized there's something that you might not know.  It has to do with citing Wikipedia as a source.

Surname Saturday: Burton

This post has turned out to be the surname post that has taken the longest to write so far.  It's not that it was entirely difficult, but when I sat down on Monday evening to start working on it, I found that there were a number of connections in Ancestral File that I didn't have in my database yet.  These connections linked a couple of different Burton family members that I knew about, extended my ancestry back a couple generations and brought several descendant lines down to listings for living cousins.  The big caveat here is that the data was in Ancestral File; I've found a few incorrect records there in the past (like records showing a child's birth a year or two after the mother's death, or a mother who only lived ten years), so I generally treat anything in Ancestral File as unconfirmed, but it does give me many more leads for research.  So, let's take a look at the ancestry starting with my 5th-great grandmother, Sarah Burton.

Surname Saturday: Amstutz

Another Saturday, another surname.  This time we look at one where we know a little bit more again, starting with my wife's 3rd-great grandmother, Katherine Amstutz.  Although this line is well populated, we recorded the information on family group sheets before we were as well versed in saving source information as we are now.  The only outside source that we have listed for this information right now is dated 1997 from gendex.com, which used to be a site listing genealogy data.  This line can get a bit confusing as names were reused frequently throughout the generations that I know about.  Regardless, here's what we know so far...

Wordless Wednesday - research trip teaser

I made a quick genealogy research trip over the weekend.  I'm still working through the data, but here's a teaser of one location I visited...

Surname Saturday update: Brown (yes, already!)

So after putting today's Surname Saturday post together, I popped over to Beta FamilySearch and tried a couple quick queries.  The short story is that I found a couple of significant records that relate to this line, including this:


Surname Saturday: Brown

It's Saturday again, so it's time to review another of the surnames that I am researching.  Just like the Beach surname, since there are still living relatives in this line, we'll start this post with my great-grandfather Charles E. Brown.  Since I started my research, I learned that Brown is the fourth most common surname in the United States as of the 2000 U.S. census.  This may make scanning indexes a little more difficult, but I have a strategy.

Early memories and science influences

At first glance, you might not think of this post as related to genealogy research.  Well, it isn't but it is.  This post contains stories from my past, and when you get right down to it, a major part of genealogy is recording stories like these.  I didn't have to research these stories since they come from my own memory, but if I didn't record them anywhere, they wouldn't be written down for a future researcher to find.  So, here we go...

One of my many interests is reading and watching various science fiction works from a wide range of artists.  There was a long discussion on the Slice of Sci Fi podcast this past summer about what got listeners interested in science fiction.  I had a couple of thoughts on this, but when the discussion branched into asking what was the first thing that scared the bejeebus out of listeners, it got me really thinking about my experiences in the early to mid-1970s.  Now that we're into October, let's hear all about those scary events.