As a volunteer at my county museum, I am currently cataloging table linens. There is plenty of variety in this category, everything from decades-old redwork pillow shams to tatted tablecloths. This week I came across a set of crepe paper table napkins, dating probably to the early 20th century. They were delicately thin and fragile,…
Marian Pierre-Louis writes of the importance of “getting local” with research in her Roots and Rambles blog and I couldn’t agree more. we are fortunate to have great tools to take us beyond the letters, records and even artifacts that might tell us stories of our ancestors. Not just maps, but street level views from…
Much of the time we spend on genealogy, we are hunting. We’re always looking for that precious document or artifact that will take us further in filling in the details of our family stories, and if we’re lucky, we find something. But now and then we get even luckier than that. A gift falls into…
As a volunteer collections assistant at my local county museum, I am currently assigned to cataloguing shelves of artifacts, such as the school materials I was working on this week. I picked up a small wooden box labeled “Fourth Gift” and was immediately taken back to when my children attended a Froebel school. The Froebel…
I have recently had the great good fortune of seeing my grandfather’s Soldier’s Service and Pay Book for his service in the British Army. It was loaned to me by my uncle, his only son. I will have a short time to examine it and even to ask my uncle some questions about the notations…
The hunt for the perfect research log got a lot shorter after I listened to the recent podcast from Geni.com in which Thomas MacEntee discusses his approach and even offers a ready-made template that covers a lot of what I am looking for in a research log. MacEntee describes it as a “record of a…
Recently an editor friend and I were discussing genealogy research and how we make notes along the way. She was involved in creating a research log notebook some years ago and we wondered about the best approach now that we can have iPads and other portable devices along with us in libraries. I have been…
Each of Horace Warner’s evocative photos of grubby east London children, taken early in the 20th century, tell us a fragment of a story, but leave us with so many questions. They look posed in working situations – washing laundry, caring for babies, splitting wood – but I have no doubt these kids did all…
I’ve had the immense pleasure recently of helping my mother declutter her office. It’s a big job and will take us many weeks, but fortunately she is keen to be part of the process. Not only that, but she is OK with letting go of lots of paper that has filled her office for years….
I was reading an article about work productivity, meaning typical office work, citing several iPad apps as must-haves when I discovered SoundNote. Well, genealogy researchers need to be productive, right? This little beauty records a spoken word interview or meeting quite nicely while you type notes using the iPad soft keyboard. Later, you can use…
