As the Family Historian, I have been tasked with learning as much about our family history as possible and documenting it all for future generations. Topics include genetic genealogy, research, documentation, oral history, and how to include yourself in your family tree and stories.
For a couple of years, I wrote a niche family history blog called Bold+Queer, in honor of my maternal 2x great grandma, Hannah. In the interest of simplicity, I’ve integrated some of the posts here and am archiving that site and all future family history posts will be written here.
When he was seven years old, my great grandpa, Denzil (AKA Dutch), wrote a letter to Santa that was published in the Chronicle Tribune (Marion, Indiana) on December 23. Thanks to the work of one of the marvelous research librarians at The Marion Public Library, I can now carry his sweet heart on the pulse…
This post was originally published to my old family history blog, boldandqueer(dot)com. Since no longer publishing on that site, I have moved a handful of popular posts to this space and dated them as their original publish date. However, a few posts, like this one, will be dated in the present because they are special…
Spooky Season AKA the time around Halloween and Samhain, is a time filled with pumpkins, images of antiquity, costumes, scary movies, and ghost stories. If you’re into family history or are even a little bit Witchy, it’s also the perfect time to connect with the ancestors in a more profound way. It is believed that…
Neither of us knew that the other existed until 2019 when AncestryDNA tests uncovered not only each other, but so much more we may have never known otherwise. Wild how spitting into a tube can change the very foundation of a life and open doors to futures previously unimagined. But it can and it did….
I’m set to write a piece for an upcoming anthology and have found myself at a crossroads of inspiration. The piece is about an ancestor and the clues about her life that were left in mundane places. Places like Census Records and City Directories, yearbooks and newspaper clippings. Old news written and documented over 100…
Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc. As the story goes, I was, in fact, named for the 1972 Allman Brothers song, Melissa. Not for a family member or a best friend, but for a love song. I guess there are worse things 😉 Melissa name meaning from Ancestry.com: The name Melissa…
