1940 is Almost Here

I went to Ancestry.com this morning to enter the contest they have running right now and saw at the top of the page that there's only 28 days until the release of the 1940 census. I totally forgot about that. I'm really kind of excited. There are a lot of family members I can look up in the 1940 census. I'm going to start putting together a list so I can be ready whenever it gets online.

New Article

Flexing my writing muscle this week. I created an new article called Guide to the Social Security Index. Hope you enjoy!

Celebrity Ancestors

I have been working on my family tree a lot in the past month and have been lucky to find a few notable names in there. Of course these are all tentative connections because after my great-grandparents, I'm still in the first phase of research. Most of these names are extremely distant cousins, but it's fun to link them up to my own family. If I get a little more proof together, I'll share some of these names soon.

In the meantime, I'll keep working and getting inspiration from Who Do You Think You Are? I love that show! Plus, I have written a new article that may be useful to all your researchers out there: Resources for Vintage Photographs.

Exploring "The Old Trunk"

Today I read "The Old Trunk" (1888) by Powhatan Bouldin Jr. This guy is my great-great grandmother's fourth cousin (mine four times removed). I find it a very interesting look at colonial life in Virginia as well as a great resource for genealogy. Everyone should be so lucky! (You can read my book review HERE).

I do want to share a quote from page 25 that I think is relevant to anyone researching their family. It is a description of going through that old trunk:

"This old document, is so tatters and torn, and the ink so pale that it can scarcely be read, but we pore over it with the interest of the explorer in the Holy Land. Indeed the contents of the Old Trunk are [mementos] of the past, which have been dug up, as it were, from the stream of dumb forgetfulness; and fortune has been as capricious in her dealing with them as she is with individuals. Now, we draw from the Old Trunk a paper so dimmed by age as to be scarcely legible; presently we come across another of greater antiquity, with every word as plain as when it was written. So, to-day, we meet with a young man whose frame has be wrecked upon the shoals of time; to-morrow with an old man who retains the vigor and buoyancy of youth. Here is a female just verging upon womanhood, from whose cheeks the rose has faded and gone; there is another, the mother of a numerous offspring, who is beautiful to the last."

He really captured it, right? So amazing!

Can't Wait to Read

...the two books I just found out were authored by my 4th cousin, 4x removed. His name was Powhatan Bouldin. He's a distant relative on my mom's side of the family. As far as I can tell, his family was into politics, military, and other important jobs. Luckily, even though the books are more than 100 years out of print, archive.org has the copies available. They have two books:

The Old Trunk (about a trunk of important papers belonging to his family)
Home Reminiscences of John Randolph: Of Roanoke (obviously about John Randolph)

I hope to delve into these books sometime soon to see just what kind of a writer this guy was. Thank goodness for public domain!

Saving the Most Important Documents

I know that sometimes I can be a paranoid Polly, but recently I have been shopping for ways to save my most important genealogy documents. I have also been looking for ways to save things for my blogs and websites. I looked at many models of network hard drive so that I can save things for both work and my side projects in the same place. I think this can offer me just what I want in a storage device.

Sharing a Postcard

I bought a postcard about a month ago on eBay. I didn't buy it because it was for genealogy, but because it was a postcard that originated from where many of my family members did. However, I do think it is important to share because it may help someone else in their genealogical search. Here are the scans of the front and back:





The postcard was written to a Mrs. Theodore Powers in Vermont from a woman named Linda [?] Ann.