I posted a long list of some meanings of tombstone symbols in an earlier posting. The list seems to be far from complete. Additional lists have been sent that should be added to the original list so we can attempt to interpret the symbols on our ancestors headstones.

How many of these definitions are definitive? Who knows. As mentioned in my earlier posting, many by have been chosen because the family or engraver liked them or they had meaning that was unique to their lives and experience.

That stated, most of the definitions in the two lists do ...

Did you know that a descendant of Robert E. Lee tried to recover his Arlington Estate from the Federal Government after the end of the Civil War? According to an article in the Chicago Tribune dated 29 Apr 1879, he was successful in getting a bill introduced into Congress for the recovery of the property even though 20,000 Union soldiers were buried on the property.

Found on Footnote.com

Found on Footnote.com

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I have a number of boxes in my family history closet that are full of old photos. I sort through them from time to time, scanning a few more during each pass and add the images to family histories I write or as attachments to records in my database. That is good. Photos truly do add context and broader knowledge to the "facts" about a person or family.

Let"s face it. Most of us are visual learners and photos not only grab our attention but entertain us long enough to stay engaged in reading raw text.

Some of the folks in the images are pretty funny looking though.

...

According to a report on Slashdot today, "California"s Department of Public Health has sent cease-and-desist notices to 13 companies that market genetic testing directly to consumers. (We discussed these services when they launched.) Allegedly, under state law, California residents must submit a doctor"s order to have a genetic test run. It will be interesting to see if the government will actually succeed in putting the genetic genie back in the bottle, given that all you need for testing is a few drops of saliva. The effort closely resembles US government attempts to block export ...

Many of you are using Legacy Family Tree to record your ancestry. If so, there are two excellent training video"s created by Geoff Rasmussen of Legacy on the Legacy website. They are both worth viewing regardless of your level of research expertise. As usual, Geoff includes a lot of excellent training about recording data in addition to using teaching users how to best use Legacy.

The links to these two videos are:

Legacy for Beginners http://www.legacyfamilytree.net/videos/beg7/LegacyForBeginners.html

What"s New in Legacy 7 ...

In October 2007, I wrote about the "Deal of the Year" that involved a one-year subscription to Ancestry as part of a Family Tree Maker software bundle. Well, one of my friends has found a similar deal again. She said to check out the latest offering of the Family Tree Maker 16 Standard edition that includes a six-month subscription to Ancestry. I looked at the package and it looks like we have another "Deal of the Year" at $10.49. I"ve shortened the URL to the site to save you typing a long string of letters and numbers. http://tinyurl.com/6b3qbf What is in the package? The genealogy ...

I"ve spent quite a few hours on FamilySearch labs over the past few weeks gathering death records to add to the sourcing of records in my databases.  see http://www.familysearchlabs.org

If you haven"t visited the site for a while, you will be surprised at the list of titles that have been indexed by volunteers over the past year or so.

There are new vital records postings for Norway, Cheshire, England as well as death records for Georgia, Ohio, Texas, Washington and West Virginia.

Looking for Vital records in the Czech ...

The batteries in my camera died while I was taking photos of headstones recently. I heard another vehicle park near me while replacing the batteries and looked to see if it someone I knew. It was just a MAV (mother"s assault vehicle or mini-van to most of you) with a small trailer behind it.

The driver was obviously reading something on a clipboard, so I went back to work on my photo project rather than stopping to say hello.

Twenty minutes later I heard a compressor start running and looked up to see the man sitting on the lawn taping a template to the blank side of a ...

The weather was warm and the sun was bright in the hours before the next spring storm rolled into the valley.

I decided to spend a few hours taking photos of headstones and posting them on Find-a-grave and Footnote taking advantage of a Pay-It-Forward opportunity.  

Sometimes you just have to walk away from a complex problem at work for a while and do something different to give your perspective a chance to reset and re-look at the problem through a different window.

I noted that many of the headstones ...

Tonight 60 young folks from our area gathered together in a family history research party. They were looking for any of their ancestors who were pioneers in the western U.S. or who came to America in "interesting" ways.

That doesn"t sound much different than any of us does it?

We are all searching for our ancestors and know that most of them had very interesting stories in their lives if we can just find them. Four of us "old salts" scrambled from person to person answering questions and offering suggestions to aid in their search. The questions, the "wahoos" associated ...

I first started looking for second great grandma Mary Farrar in 1966, knowing very little about her other than her possible name. She was born on the far northern border of New Hampshire in the 1820"s to Seth and Azubah Chandler Tirrill.

My mother found one of my fathers cousins in California by mailing letters to everyone in and around Calaveras county with our surname asking if they were related. We had relatives!

You see, my grandfather left Calaveras county as a teen and never returned home. Two of his sisters visited he and grandmother once before he died at the ...

This article was at the bottom of one of my file drawers. I don"t know who authored it or when, but thank them for their work and agree with their comments about all of us being related to royalty.

Finding a link to them is great because something is usually written about them. Is it always correct? Goodness NO! But, at least there is the possibility that the information is correct and it usually is more complete and extends farther back in time than almost any other knowledge about our "commoner" ancestors.

"The ...

Not all that long ago, or so it seems to me, I built the first computer available for home users. My IMSI 8080 was THE big thing among us technology nuts. We were no longer tied to using a terminal hooked to a mainframe. You flipped switches on the face plate to program it and it was heaven. Then came more advanced computer components and power. I had to have them too. The storage memory was on cassette tapes and the onboard RAM was just enough to designate the three zeros in its number to "K". Wow! Here I am now, with more processing power in my personal workstation than mainframes ...

The team at Footnote.com have been working on a very special project for the past few months. They"ve captured images of the Vietnam Wall in Washington D.C. and have added a tremendous amount of information to the names of every person listed on it. The work has been infectious to team members and others who have seen it. It is your turn now. Visit it at www.footnote.com/thewall The entire wall has been masterfully photographed and is searchable by name. Who is represented by all of these names? They are the fallen heros of the Vietnam war. The statistics listed are ...

Brick walls or other missing information in your ancestral research are common to all of us. Frequently, the information we need is fairly close to us in time, yet seems to be as elusive as the exact birth date of an ancestor born in 1582. Our ancestor was born or died in a sparsely populated county or area and government and church records were never created for them for one reason or another. Therefore, their missing information is impossible to find. Right? That may not be true in more cases than you"d think. In 1985, my wife an I traveled to Calaveras County, California looking ...