Memorial Day - Remembering Our Family Members Who Served

This is a day for quiet reflection of the people in our family who have given military service for our country. They are one of the important reasons for creating a family history and not just a genealogy for our families. Their stories are told through pictures, text and sometimes videos. One large notebook for an honored man, Ben Homer Davis, sits in my office waiting for me to finish scanning the pages documenting his military service in the Marines and later the Navy, including World War II. His story waits to be compiled and written.

PowerPoint Presentations and Webinars

In 2002, right after graduating from BYU, I presented my first genealogy class on how to do Cemetery Research at our local Family History Center. Since that time my list of classes has grown to twenty, with presentations to about twenty four groups. For some groups I presented numerous times in the past eleven years and to a few only once. Usually the number of classes is one to two at a time, but there were a couple of all day seminars of three or four classes.  Most of the groups are here in Oregon, but some classes were in Washington and at BYU in Utah.

Gathering Cemetery Information for My Mother-In-Law's Late Present

So, my husband talks with his mother on Sunday and she mentions that she is going to Missouri and may visit some family gravesites. Then I of course print out a list of people in his family buried there. Looking online for information I come across several of them in findagrave.com with lots of data and pictures. She will be getting a late Mother's Day present.

Why Researchers Need to Search all Available Websites

Last week at the end of one of my genealogy classes an attendee approached me about an ancestor by the name of Ami who fought and died in the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Being the curious researcher that I am, I decided to look for someone by that name in online records about that battle. Known as Custer's Last Stand, there is a large monument erected to the memory of the soldiers that died in this battle.

Hunting for Family Burial Information and Serendipity

For the past month I have been searching for information for a client who is looking to find information on her mother's grandfather's brother's family. The project entailed contacting various cemeteries, funeral homes and public libraries, while also doing some online searching for obituaries and newspaper articles related to the family. Out of those eighteen contacts made, there were several that provided valuable material about this family.

Surprising Serendipity Moments through the Portal

In honor of the blogiversary of GopherGenealogy@blogspot.com
I want to share two wonderful articles about two of my great grandmothers. Two weeks ago while working at the local Family Search (History) Center we were not busy, so I took some time to explore our premium websites.  The premium websites are accessible on the computers in Family Search Centers and then through the Portal provided through the familysearch.org website.

GopherGenealogy Two Year Blogiversary

I am a statistics person, so for the two-year blogiversary I want to again share some of the information provided for this blog through blogspot.com and compare it to the first year. This is a way for me to record this data and track the history of who is reading the posts, where they are located, what types of search engines they use, what browsers they use, what referring sites they are coming from, and what types of posts and pages they are most interested in.