Week 9            Language I’ve given this one a lot of thought, like many of the 52 prompts at first read I think I have nothing and no one to write about – shaking my head.  I got to thinking about puzzles and since I regularly do the daily crossword I remembered my Aunt Bird.  She…

Week 9            Changing Names When I first worked as a genealogy librarian, people would often comment that their family names were changed by the government, like census workers, or upon arrival at ports like Ellis Island. This was one if not the most common myth among amateur genealogists.  Then I attended a lecture by an…

Week 8 Heirlooms Objects. Things. That stuff that once belonged to a relative that got passed down officially or not to someone in the family. I have several. Some feel like museum pieces in that they have no utilitarian use in my home, they are almost like objects of art in that their value is…

Leap Years are not really that odd, despite the extra day added to the end of February there’s not much else to make it different except for the rather sexist tradition of women being “allowed” to propose marriage to men. A long standing, and multicultural tradition was that during the Leap Year, although some traditions…

Week 7 Immigration The prompt this week speaks of “our” desire to know where our ancestors came from and unless you are a Native American you had to come from someplace outside the United States. (Reminder: this is all written from my perspective, here in the beautiful state of New York.) If there’s one thing…

Week 6            Earning a Living Without looking at my research, just sitting here thinking about what my ancestors did to earn a living, nothing jumps out at me. Of course, like so much work that we do around genealogy this prompt seems male-centric. Does earning a living mean the term used historically to define work…

When I first read this prompt and the brief description of it, I was certain I had no one to write about. Then I sat with it and thought about this date – today – January 28.  It is also the birthdate of my father, William Gilbert Sammons, who was born on the 28th of…

A Forgotten Witness This prompt brings to mind the obvious moments – wars mostly. I have several ancestors and family members who served their country during wartime. One lost his life at the Second Battle of Winchester in 1864. In a cemetery less than two blocks from my home, is buried my Revolutionary War ancestor;…

It’s hard to chose just one. In my kitchen hangs a black and white photo of my grandmother, Sadie, and her sister Jessie. They are on the front porch of my grandparents’ winter home in Florida – it had to be taken some time prior to 1963 when my grandmother died. The two sisters are…

Which Family? If the prompt is “where is your family from?” that is a complicated question. I would probably put my librarian’s hat on and ask a follow up question such as, “which family?”  I had two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great great grandparents and so on.  Here’s a visual: I do…