Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It’s Saturday Night again –

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along – cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1)  Ellen Thompson-Jennings wrote Who Has Helped You The Most With Your Family History? on her Hound on the Hunt blog this week.  That is a great prompt for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.  Thank you, Ellen!

Who has helped me (the most) with my genealogy?

• My grandmother, Winnie Currey Crawford gets credit for starting me on this over 40 year journey.
• My mother-in-law gets credit for teaching me about pedigree charts and family group sheets
• My grandmothers, Winnie Crawford and Pauline Mentzer for collecting and passing on family information, documents and pictures
• American Genealogical Lending Library (AGLL) for providing access to microfilm of records that were mailed to my home. (I live 75 miles from a family history center or library with a genealogy collection.) [The Role of the AGLL in Supplying Microform Resources Readily Available to Genealogists ]
• My great aunts, Gladys Crawford and Pearl Currey, for their work researching my Crawford and Currey ancestors
• My mother’s cousin, Max Briles, for compiling a Briles genealogy
• The Topeka Genealogical Society and the Northwest Missouri Genealogical Society for their libraries and resources
• Ruth Keys Clark for sponsoring research trips to Salt Lake City and encouraging me to grow my skills as a genealogist.
• RootsWeb and GenWeb communities — for the multitude of volunteer hours sharing genealogy information and techniques
• SASE (self addressed stamped envelopes) and e-mail for helping me request records and connect with other researchers
• Thomas MacEntee (Genealogy Bargains, Do-Over), Dear Myrtle and Mondays with Myrt for helping me update my skills after retirement
• Richard Lackey and Elizabeth Shown Mills (Evidence Explained) for helping me learn to document my research
• RootsMagic for providing an easy process to convert my Master Genealogist data to RootsMagic

But the MOST help with my genealogy research has come from the actions of the 1875 Kansas Editors’ and Publishers. Their founding of the Kansas State Historical Society and insistence that the Kansas newspapers be preserved has made this vast collection of newspapers available for me to research today.

• Kansas State Historical Society (Wikipedia)
• Kansas Newspapers (FamilySearch Wiki)
• Kansas Newspaper Database
• Kansas Historical Open Content (Newspapers.com)
• Free Historical Newspaper Links – Kansas (Ancestor Hunt List)

Since all of my second great-grandparents lived in Kansas with all but one dying in Kansas, these newspapers have provided a wealth of information about my family.

Even though this collection of newspapers has helped me the most, I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize the help my husband has provided over the years. Not only has he allowed me to spend money on my genealogy research but he has travelled with me on research trips. During a trip to Salt Lake City and the Tetons, my husband started researching his own tree. Now in retirement, we both are enjoying the challenges of researching our respective trees.