The wedding card to my parents is signed “your cousin.” The writer was my dad’s cousin, but not his first, second, or third cousin. She was his first cousin twice removed–meaning that she was his grandfather’s first cousin. Well actually she was his grandfather’s half-first cousin making her my Dad’s half-first cousin twice removed. Someone who says they are a cousin may be biologically related, but do not assume that they are first cousins. It is also possible that someone calls someone cousin when they is no biological relationship.
Reading the entire newspaper article in which your relative’s name appears should be done because at the very least it provides context. Sometimes it provides much more. Sophia Dirks was easy to find in this March 1896 entry in the Camp Point [Illinois] Journal because her name was spelled correctly and the legible print made it easy to read. The article documented her employment at the Adams County Poor Farm as a “matron assistant.” There was another name in the article as well: John Diesback. In April of 1896, Sophia Dirks and John Diesbach–actually John Driesbach–were married in Coatsburg, Adams, Illinois, where Sophia was from. I had wondered how Sophia and John met. This newspaper article referencing their employment at the local poor farm explained how they met. […]
I’ve been going through and scanning my grandparents’ slides and identifying the individuals in them. This needs to be done carefully and not hastily. I saw a picture of my Mom talking to a cousin of my grandmother and made the identification after his name popped into my head. It turned out that the name was wrong. I was right about the family the guy was from but it was not the person I originally thought it was–it was his brother. Comparing it to another picture I have of this man–around the same time fortunately–confirmed who it was. Slightly longer reflection caused me to remember that my grandparents saw the “correct name” cousin more than the cousin whose name initially came to mind. Take a minute before you […]
I purchased a scanner for the slides and negatives I have in my collection of family history materials. There needs to be some thought before I just start running materials through the scanner. I don’t want to capture just what is on the slides. There’s more that I need–information on the boxes some of the slides are in and information written on the slide itself. I need to tie that information to the slides that were in a specific box. The box in the image contained slides of photos taken when my grandparents and I went to Nebraska in 1990. None of the slides in that box have anything written on them but I need to track which images came from the box with the “1990 Nebraska Us […]
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