Winning Week

This past week has been an excellent one for genealogy wins.  Last Tuesday I was notified that I won the €100 worth of publications prize from Eneclann's RootsTech drawing.  And Saturday at the Fairfax Genealogical Society Spring Conference I won 5 hours of Italian genealogy research with Lo Schiavo Genealogica.  It must be my birthday week!

Now for the hard part - choosing my Irish publications, and determining what Italian information I want to focus on for my research.  I don't know where in Ireland my ancestors came from, so I don't have specific counties or townlands from which to request data.  And now I have quite a number of Italian ancestors to choose from for further research in Italy!  Decisions, decisions...

Hello, (blogging) world!

Despite the intent of this blog as a genealogy adventure, a form of “Hello, world!” seems an appropriate starting post for this software professional.  I’ve recently returned from my 3rd RootsTech conference, where the tech-based Innovator Summit sessions hold as much interest for me as the genealogy specific ones.  And once again, everyone was talking about using blogs to record your research, share it, and of course, as cousin bait.  Since my main web site is still partying like it’s 1999 (that’s about when I first created it), I figured it wouldn’t hurt to play with some blogging software and see if I could do any better at keeping that up to date.

You may have noticed that there are a number of posts prior to this date, and wonder how I can have started a blog prior to starting a blog.  Is it magic?  Have I learned how to time travel?!?  How can this be?!?!?!?  Lacking a DeLorean, I fall back on what tech knowledge I do have - in this case, backups.  These blog sites provide a way to take a backup of all the posts, as well as a way of restoring that backup.  But what if you were to, say, tweak the backup files?  Maybe change the dates, change the titles...  Well, then you can create posts for earlier dates.  So I thought I might try to document my genealogy journey prior to this date as well, while keeping my discoveries in chronological order.  (My thought of documenting my ancestor's journeys using dates from their timelines was foiled by the blogging software not believing in blog posts dated prior to about 1970, and rejected them on restore. Bummer!)

Let the grand adventure begin!

A #genchat Learning Experience

So, as I was putting together my list of films to request at the Family History Library during RootsTech, I was trying to narrow down the list. The FHL has a number of directories for my Great Grandmother's hometown of Harburg in Bavaria, Germany, on microfilm currently located at the vault and not in the library proper. After last night's ‪#‎genchat‬ about re-evaluating sources you already have, I realized that I ALREADY HAVE THIS INFORMATION. It is in a book on the housing history of the town I got when I visited in 2006.

Cover of Harburg Hauserchronik

It's in German, grouped by house, and lists the ownership history of each house in town. And it has an index of names. Duh! There are more relatives in this town than those from the one house I focused on, and a first quick scan tells me that the owners of the 1575 German bible I have were my great grandmother's next door neighbors!!! *facepalm*

I think I have my source for re-evaluation for challenge #2, discovered while working on one of my SMART goals for challenge #1. It won't be close to done before the next chat though (or perhaps even this year!!).

Let the discoveries continue to steamroll!