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)  Did you follow a research trail down a genealogy rabbit hole this week?  Tell us about it.

Ha! Ha! Did I ever!

I was supposed to be researching my McCormick ancestors in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. However, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that there is not ‘master’ list of Purple Heart recipients. Thus, I started going thru the newspapers to compile a list. While I’m not done, I have discovered quite a few Nemaha County recipients. (Purple Hearts).

As a volunteer for the Nemaha County Historical Society, I not only created the Purple Heart page, but updated a website that I created a long time ago to provide links to the wide variety of historical and genealogical resources available. (See: Nemaha County KS History and Genealogy)

Knowing that the Veterans’ Day 1946 issue of the local paper (Courier Tribune) had an article detailing all of the Nemaha Countians who had died during WWII, I decided to start blogging about them on Tuesdays. I’ve published two such blogs (Joseph Enneking and Bernard Schultejans). This past week, I was working on the blog for this coming Tuesday, where I planned to highlight Dorothy Swart Tatum.

I’ve been using the Veterans’ Day article and obituaries to create these posts. When I tried to find the obituary for Dorothy Tatum in the local paper, I could not read the first half of the obituary. Since this part of the obituary highlighted her military career, I started looking elsewhere for information. And this search was the ‘start’ of my journey down a ‘rabbit hole’. Even though Dorothy was born in Nemaha county and is buried in Nemaha county, I found a wealth of articles about her military career in TEXAS newspapers. The more I found, the more interesting her story, and the deeper I got in that rabbit hole.

Since Dorothy’s parents had moved to Oakley, Kansas, I decided to check to see whether their local library had digitized their newspapers. And thankfully, they had. Thus, I was able to go deeper down my ‘rabbit hole’ to not only find an obituary but also some letters Dorothy wrote to her parents. Because of the wealth of newspaper articles I found, Dorothy’s post for Tuesday, August 29th, mushroomed into four posts that will appear starting Tuesday.

So, please come back on Tuesday to start reading about Dorothy Swart Tatum!