Memory Tree Genealogy Journal

England, here we come!   "Remember Me - a Genealogy Journal" is heading to Oxford, England for a week of fun in the...well...rain and cold!  Much more fun than that, we'll visit with friends from several military moves ago.  At this point, we each have two children (!) and have aged nearly 10 years (!!).  Here's to hoping we still look the same! With better planning, I really could have made this a fantastic genealogy trip.  The fact is...the places we'd like to visit are over 2 1/2 hours driving distance from our rental cottage in Oxford.  Sans kids, this would have been doable.  BUT - with two under the age of 5, and one of them still consistently napping, we'll take a more conservative approach.  Before we move away from Europe, I'd love to return to visit Dorset (TREVETT family) and Thirsk, Yorkshire (SMITH family).  I know that many, many more of my ancestors are from the UK.  Identifying their actual birth places is on the ho...

In case you were wondering...no, I can't claim credit for the alliterative blog titles like "Maritime Monday" and "Tombstone Tuesday"!  As a way to jump-start my writing, I've subscribed to GeneaBloggers , a database of...you guessed it...other genealogy bloggers.  GB is super-wonderful at networking blogger-to-blogger, promoting writing prompts, and sharing truly helpful research information.  You'll notice their logo in my sidebar ========> Each day, a wonderful list of writing prompts is posted.  LOTS of ideas.  Some weeks I'll do the posts - some weeks I'll let the writing spirit move me.  Either way, it's so helpful for generating ideas! For today's tombstone, I present Isaac Trevett (and wife Elizabeth (Charles) Trevett).  Isaac is my husband's 3rd great-grandfather, who was born in Broadmayne, Dorchester, UK in 1805 [1] and died in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa in 1893 [2] . [1] Ances...

Instead of jumping right into the multi-generational tradition of service in the US Navy among my husband's relatives (would have been too obvious?  No?)...I'll kick off the first of my "Maritime Monday" posts with a nod at one of my several German immigrant ancestors.  Ship travel?  Check!   On 18 Septemer 1868, my 3rd great-grandfather Anselmus Ostholthoff arrived in New York aboard the German steam ship "Smidt" after a trans-Atlantic journey from Andervenne, Germany.  His traveling companions - wife Maria Anna (Toepke) Ostholthoff, their eldest son Johan Gerhard (2 years), and daughter Anna Maria (9 months). The following snippet from their arrival documentation [1] indicates that Anselmus ("Selmus") was a farmer from Andervenne.  His stated destination after New York: Virgina.  This is curious to me, because I have record of Anselmus living in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1870 [2] .  At this point, Mr. Ostholthoff is no longer working as a ...

A bit of joy for my Friday! Our mail delivery within our little military community here in Sicily is so.very.sloooooow.  What makes it maddening is that it can be a combination of super-fast and super-slow...so no one seems to balk at the trend of inconsistency.  Maybe I complain enough for everyone :). I'm in the middle of a few genealogical mysteries - one of them being the family origins of a Mr. Joseph W. Daly, a paternal great-grandfather of my husband.  Like most of the challenging parts of our tree, I hit a wall with Joseph a few months back and promptly put him aside when something a little more lucrative came along.  For sake of ease.  Now, we meet again.  For this one, I even consulted a few curious friends.  I felt like maybe I wasn't searching deep enough or with the right "keywords" online or in my genealogy search engines.  Some researchers have favored methodologies for searching, and I felt I needed to branch out.  One ...

(Image of Family Tree Chart from Fresh Retro Gallery)  They're here!  A few weeks ago, I ordered four copies of blank family tree charts (pictured above) from the Etsy store Fresh Retro Gallery.  One is an heirloom gift for the son of a friend...celebrating his BIG first birthday this month!  One is four our home...one is for my parents...and the other is for, well, whoever wants it!  I fell in love with the tree design when searching online, and I was pleasantly surprised that Fresh Retro was offering a 2-for-1 deal.  SCORE!  At less than $15 each, I was more than happy to purchase four.  I can't wait to a) perfect my tree and b) perfect my calligraphy and add this tree to our family "Wall of Fame" (a work in progress). Joining this tree on our Wall of Fame are two silhouettes of the boys that I ordered on Etsy last year (so southern, so vintage, so perfectly adorable).  I believe the artist who completed the silhouettes is not longer...

Paperwork got you down? Today's project  = print, file, organize. I'm a happy researcher now after having spent the past hour organizing my random collection of photos, sources, and comments saved on my already cluttered computer desktop.  Everything is now neatly arranged in family folders, photos have descriptive file names, and unnecessary files are in the recycling bin.  I even tackled the HUGE list of emails I've saved in a "family research" file in Thunderbird (Outlook for hippies...LOL).  Printed all and filed accordingly.  It's only taken me, oh, 9 months! If you are a fellow genealogist, what's your preferred method/system of organizing all of the random bits and clues you collect along the way?  Outside of Family Tree Maker (a fabulous Ancestry.com product, by the way) which stores all source documents...how do you like to keep track of the emails from family, historical societies, etc.?  Still working on my own system. ...

Dallas Jackson Hughes was my father's grandfather.  Born in 1880 in Henry County, Alabama, Dallas later married Hattie Bruner and had several children - among them, my grandfather Alto Hughes.  Below is an image of Dallas' WWI draft registration card from September 1918, almost a year after congress passed the Selective Service Act ( Wikipedia ).  WWI draft registration cards have been very helpful for me personally, because they include such detailed information.  Place of birth, next of kin, occupation, citizenship, physical description.  According to his card, Dallas was of medium height, medium build, had gray eyes and dark brown hair.  This definitely helps me form a mental picture. Ancestry.com. U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005.  Accessed 24 January 2013. Dallas is at the heart of one of my currently genealogical mysteries - a "brick wall" in resear...

Today's "Wedding Wednesday" picture is definitely not "old" by antique standards!  But - it's a great starting place for this blog celebrating family. (6 March 2004, Navy Supply Corps School, Athens, Georgia.  Photo held by Sarah Melvey.) On March 6, 2004, my husband Paul and I celebrating our wedding in Athens, Georgia.  After a short ceremony in a packed military chapel on base (complete with blazing temperatures due to an early Spring heatwave), we commemorated the event at a casual dinner at the Officer's Club.  Chaplain Uhall officiated the service.  Family and friends numbered about 120.  How wonderful that our extended family and friends from Minnesota, Arizona, Colorado, Ohio, Washington, D.C., California, Georgia, and Florida could travel to Athens for our simple (and quickly-planned) wedding. After two years of courtship, Paul proposed on New Year's Eve at the now-defunct Harry Bissett's restaurant in Athens...site of our first...

Here goes nothing... After nearly a year of working diligently on our family history (for both sets of families), I have taken the leap and decided to share my thoughts and research in blog form.  It dawned on me recently that all of my AHA moments, happy dances, dead-end frustrations have been exactly that - MINE - when they really belong to our extended family!  It's the least I can do after pinging them constantly for information, names, dates, random clues that might lead us down the right research rabbit hole.  After all, what good is all of this work if it's not shared with the ones I love?  So, here I present "Remember Me" - my research ramblings in presentable form (hopefully!).  My initial inspiration for exploring our family tree was to have something wonderfully interesting to pass along to our two boys.  Daily, I am awed at the machinations and serendipity (otherwise known as God's marvelous foresight!) that were required for my darling husb...