I’m being pulled  in a lot of different directions lately but I still want to keep this blog going so here’s me, yet again, saying I’ll try to be better about writing.

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Summer is a time of family gatherings—weddings, open houses, and reunions. Are you taking advantage of your family time to build on your genealogy research? Even just sitting around and sharing photographs can spark great family storytelling! That’s what Grandma Trotter, my aunts, and I were doing in this picture.

 

One of the projects I’ve been working on for the last few months is an update of my research on Grandma Trotter’s family (my paternal grandmother) accomplished through solo research and a big crowdsourcing project amongst my distant cousins. The sharing was an interesting experiment. I pulled together all of my notes in a register report from our earliest known York ancestors and then one of my cousins sent it out by email to family all over the country with orders to send corrections and additions to me.

Some of the corrections made total sense, some were confusing, some totally contradicted each other. We have step-children, illegitimate children who are still blood related, we even had the moment where I had to look at two people’s additions repeatedly before I understood that representatives from two different wings of the family had married—not uncommon, just confusing in the corrections. But it was a wholly rewarding experience… marred only by the fact that I can’t attend this particular reunion.

[Trotters and Yorks—I’ve been working on our genealogy for years so I know mine is not the only family effected by the reunions being in the same month.]

Happy hunting!

Jess