Call for articles - Genealogy Stories, Holiday edition

The pursuit of genealogy is all about finding and telling family stories.  There is quite a bit more to the family story than just dates and places.  Let's hear some of the stories that have been told around the dinner table or that have come up in our research.  Dates and places by all means can be included, but they shouldn't be the main focus of the story submitted for the carnival.

As this carnival will be posted on November 30, just after Thanksgiving in the U.S. and leading into the winter holidays, the theme of this carnival will be "Holiday."  This theme can be interpreted in a number of ways; here are some ideas to get you started:

• Tell us a story about the most memorable holiday celebration you've had.
• Are there any unique holiday traditions in your family history?
• What does a specific holiday mean to your family?
• Share a picture from a holiday celebration and tell us about it.
• Find someone in your ancestral lines who was born, married or died on a holiday and tell us the story of that person(s).
• You could even use the British definition of the term "holiday" and tell us about a memorable vacation.

Once you've written your post, submit it to the carnival to participate.

Let's have fun with this.

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...

Call for articles - Genealogy Stories, Halloween edition

I've been kicking around this idea for a while and now it's time to act on it.  I'm starting a new blog carnival for genealogy bloggers called Genealogy Stories.  As I put in the carnival description, the pursuit of genealogy is all about finding and telling family stories. While many genealogists concentrate on finding only birth/marriage/death information, there is quite a bit more to the family story than those dates and places.  I'd like to have a series of carnivals posted on a monthly basis with various themes, but to share the fun, I'd like to have the host for each edition rotate around various blogs, posted on the last day of the month.  The focus of this carnival is the stories beyond the vital statistics; dates and places by all means can be included, but they shouldn't be the main focus of the story submitted for the carnival.

When I started this blog a little over a year ago, the first article that I thought about writing was a story about a real skeleton in the attic of one of my ancestors.  And now that I've started on the post that I want to add for Halloween 2010, it seems to me that this theme would be perfect to start off the Genealogy Stories carnival.  So, write a post to your blog containing a Halloween-inspired story from your genealogy.  It could be about the scariest Halloween you ever had, a story of the first thing that scared the bejeebus out of you, something that happened to an ancestor around the holiday, an unusual death story or even a photo of a Halloween costume. Once you've got your post prepared, submit the permalink to the carnival (the deadline is October 29) and then join us on Halloween to read all the stories.

Let's have some fun with this!