ancestry
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The front of the postcard (above) and the picture below are both from the Painted Desert in Arizona. I would love to put that and the Petrified Forest National Park on my travel bucket list, but I’m afraid I would melt in the heat. It is incredibly beautiful, though. The card itself talks about the…
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Recent discovery This discovery is as recent as it gets. I just checked my e-mail to find that my order from the Iron Range Research Center in Minnesota had been completed. A week or two ago, I requested a copy of a Declaration of Intent, which was the “first step toward naturalization for most persons…
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Residence: then & now This is the house that I spent much of my childhood in. It looks smaller now. The light colored deck was not there and we didn’t have a fence around the yard. We probably should have…our dog was not the nicest to strangers… The red brick-ish building you can see a…
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Criminal in the family Depending on how I look at this prompt, I see two options. The first is that I don’t have a criminal in the family. When I think “criminal” I think serial killer. Bank robber. Gang member. Arsonist. Something like that. I don’t have any of those in my family that I…
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A family heirloom I wouldn’t say that anything has necessarily been passed down to me through generations, other than all the family history work that my uncle has done and whoever had come before him. I think that is probably the most important heirloom. Knowledge. Other than that… I have my dad’s army uniform that…
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DNA discovery When I first got my DNA results back from Ancestry, I was surprised to see that I was less Norwegian than I thought I was, and more German. At the beginning, the Ancestry DNA kits didn’t give you a whole lot of information other than a breakdown of your ancestral regions. Fast forward…
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Oldest Photo I think these are two of my oldest photos. I can’t be completely sure when they were taken. Above is Wolfgang “Frank” Preisinger (1830-1898). According to the person who uploaded this photo onto Ancestry.com, it was taken in the 1890’s. Frank died at the age of 68. Below are Wolfgang, his wife Julianna,…
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Surprising discovery I’ve posted about him before, but this is Michael O’Laughlen (1840-1867). He is a somewhat distant ancestor of my work bestie’s-husband and an Abraham Lincoln assassination co-conspirator. He was a childhood friend of John Wilkes Booth. He would claim that he dropped out of the plot to kill Lincoln, but he did end…

