Here are a few suggested reads for the first Saturday of December 2019:
1. The Legal Genealogist, Judy Russell, posted about the USCIS outrageous hike in fees for record copies about two weeks ago. Now James Tanner, of Genealogy's Star blog, joins in with a thorough explanation. The deadline (December 16th) is fast approaching to register your protest, so read Mr. Tanner's reminder here.
2. Marian Wood, of Climbing My Family Tree blog, posted a short piece about some ceramic sculptures done by her late mother-in-law back in the 1950s. The sculptures are pictured in the post. What caught my eye and mind, however, was the idea contained in the last paragrapgh of the post -- the reason WHY she posted about these family artifacts. Since I have an accumulation of artifacts I think Marian's idea is an awesome one to preserve not just the artifacts themselves. What is the idea? Well you will have to read Marian's post here to find out. ;-)
3. Elizabeth Handler, of From Maine to Kentucky blog, reminds us this week that school yearbooks can be a nice source of genealogy information. Read her post here.
4. Peter Muise, of New England Folklore blog, posted about "Folklore Books for the Christmas Season." If you or someone you know likes folklore, Peter has some gift suggestions for you. Read about them here.
5. Many (if not all) genealogists get a special thrill out of finding a document that contains the actual signature of a long departed ancestor or relative. I have several examples of such signatures in my genealogy documents. Some years ago I came up with the idea of preserving not just signatures of living family members, but also a sample of their writing that contained every letter of the alphabet in the way they formed each letter. [See the post on this book here.] It is a small, spiral-bound "book" of 3 x 5 index cards that some years ago could be bought at Staples or Office Depot. I have each family member (and any new addition to the family who can write) put their signature on one of the index cards along with the sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." This captures their signature and shows in one sentence how they write each letter. But here is very neat idea about preserving and displaying signatures that could even make a great gift to family members this holiday season. See Laura Mattingly's beautiful idea here at The Old Trunk in the Attic blog.
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Copyright 2019, John D. Tew
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John, I greatly appreciate being included in your best of list! TY and happy holidays!
ReplyDeleteThank you for including my post, John. I love your idea for current family member signatures! I remember that sentence well from typing class, but great idea for capturing everyone's handwriting.
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