Choices. Consequences: They never sleep. From the time we are born, we make choices and enjoy the consequences of those choices. We often associate the word “consequences” with something bad, but it also represents something good happening in our lives. The “good” is a result of a choice or choices that are building blocks or enablers of positive positioning and positive results in the experiences of life. My father was not known as a leader in the community, in business or even in his neighborhood. Rather, he was an activist who quietly and often anonymously ...

My 9th great grandmother, Susannah North Martin , and two great aunts, Rebecca Towne Nurse and Mary Towne Estey , were hung as witches in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. I’ve visited their home towns, hanging hill and hopefully their graves or at least areas near their graves. Sorrow and some anger arose in my mind during my first visit to hanging hill in Salem. I still feel twinges of those emotions when I visit Salem today. Why were these people murdered by their neighbors? Maybe the trial documents and notes will help me understand the mindset of the day. Maybe you had to be ...

I’ve spent a lot of hours looking for ancestral information in old newspapers over the past few weeks. Some of the articles brought Joy. Others made me Sad. Thank goodness that these treasures weren’t lost when the newspapers were discarded years ago. I knew that one of my great grandfathers had experienced a nervous breakdown after spending years in a particularly nasty work environment, but didn’t realize how badly he was affected. Reading article after article about his problems made me ache over the impact his problems had on his wife, children, parents and extended ...

After spending several nights trying to interpret the handwriting on old census records, I realized that I haven’t written anything extensive on paper for a long time. How does my handwriting now compare to what it did when I was young? Well, it depends on the day. Some days, my current hand strokes produce very legible well-formed text. On other days, the message still leaves my brain but seems to degrade by the time it reaches my hand and my writing suffers as a result. Of course, some days I’m apparently dyslexic when using a keyboard and some days it isn’t a ...

A fellow recently demonstrated his ability to recover data from a hard drive whose data had been overwritten a seven times using a data shredder program set to a supposed DOD data destruction standard. If you have ever had any experience with identity theft , you understand why the hackles on the back of my neck stood up when I read the story. I’m a genealogist . I have a lot of data on my hard drives that contains private information about living individuals. From time to time I buy a new computer or hard drives and migrate my data to them. I’ve always wiped my old drives ...

How do you record your life? Do you write in a journal daily? Do you use software to record your history in regular sit-down sessions? If so, do you print it out so it isn’t lost when your hard drive fails? How are you recording the histories of your ancestors? If so, you probably use a series of writing sessions that are inspired because of a story you remember or research find that you encounter. Today, reading of a news story in Australia reminded me of a story about my father. I’ve enjoyed it ever since one of his employees told me about it during a lunch hour years after ...

I’d heard stories about my great grandparents, Robert and Rosa Logie Bennett homesteading a farm since I was very young and often wondered about them. Of the ten children in the Bennett family, three babies died either at birth or before they were three. All three were buried on the family farm in there in the bottom land of Fort Canyon, Alpine, Utah. I missed living on the old homestead by a few months and never knew where the Bennett children, Beatrice , Pansy and a stillborn son were buried. In 1983, I asked my family about them and my oldest brother could still remember where ...

There are times when you just have to sit and shake you head. There are no words to describe the situation fully. Today hosted one of those events for me. I have been searching for one of my ancestral family for years without success. I’ve looked at my research notes repeatedly hoping that they would offer up a clue or initiate a thought process that I hadn’t explored already. The result was always the same. No missed clues, no new ideas, nothing found in new searches. That was until today. My Pavlonian trained mind was apparently working with a disconnect because when I ...

While researching further information on my ancestors who served as soldiers in the Revolutionary War, I realized that over the years, my memory regarding the sequence of events leading up to and during the war was faulty. Over time the nuggets of information and stories we find about our ancestors tend to create divergent parallel universes in our minds. The longer the period of our research and larger number of persons in our quest often result in a struggle to remember which universe is the ‘real’ one. In my mind, the ‘Battle of Bunker (Breeds) Hill’ shifted ...

Looking through some old photos of my wife and myself today, I laughed out loud a few times. Wearing striped bell bottoms or Levi’s that always look too short seemed to be the order of the day. Why did I wear my Levi’s so short? Every photo showed three inches of socks showing between the bottom of my pants and my shoes. Why? Yeah, they were shink-to-fits but couldn’t I just add enough length when purchasing them? I remember having ‘cheat’ grass sticking in my socks all of the time and grousing about it. Duh! Why did my father buy his Levi’s so long ...