Thrifty Thursday - Utilizing Free Online Resources

I've been very lucky to within a few hours drive of the LDS Family History Library for much of the past 18 years.  However, being a mother of five kids doesn't lend itself well to genealogy expeditions, even if they're only an hour or two away.  I've been so thankful, especially in the last few years, for an increasing number of websites and records that are available for free search online. This might be pretty basic for old pro's, but it's always nice to get tips.  Some of the ones I've frequented (in no particular order) are:

• FamilySearch - As more records are digitized and transcribed, this increasingly becomes a great resource for me.  I'm not totally happy with the organization of results from a search, yet, but I've been able to find important information that I hadn't found in years of research, because I didn't know where to look.  
• Utah Digital Newspapers - I LOVE newspapers!  I have a Newspaper Archive subscription that I utilize regularly, but it's not comprehensive.  Having a lot of ancestors that lived in Utah at some point, the Utah Digital Newspapers site has been a wonderful resource for me.  I've found clues, obituaries, scalliwags, and funny stories that flesh out the bare facts and make my ancestors personal.  
• Utah Death Certificate Index - Death records and more for the State of Utah for the years 1904 - 1958.
• Find A Grave - I think most of us has used this.  Many thank you's to the amazing volunteers who make this site possible.
• Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness - This is a free and great way to have someone in the area that you're researching (and can't get to immediately) do some legwork for you.
• West Virginia Vital Research Records - Birth, Marriage, and Death Records for West Virginia.  I love when states put these resources online.  HUGE help!
• USGenWeb - One of the original resources for online genealogy, volunteer-driven, this has been a great resource over the years.  Some county pages are better than others, but it's been a helpful website for me.
• Ohio Online Death Certificate Index - 1913 - 1944.
• Google Books and Images - I always run these searches on someone I'm researching - I've found pictures, digitized county histories, business directories and almanacs, etc.  
• Family Tree Magazine's 2010 Best State Websites for Genealogy - Self-explanatory, and very helpful.  I just found this.  :)

Anyways, these are just a few of the ones I've found over the years.  I know there are more.  Many universities have digitized records for their state, including photography collections.  

Please comment with other websites you've found to be helpful, I'll add them to the list!

Geneabloggers - New Genealogy Blogs

This is shamelessly silly, but I'm excited about it.  I've been featured as one of the new blogs of the week "discovered" by GeneaBloggers!  I put discovered in quotations because I recommended myself to them, but it is exciting to see my blog listed up there with all of the other new blogs discovered this week.  It's also been fun to have my daily post listed in the roll-up widgets of the daily blogging prompts.  They also list "holidays" for each date of the year.  For example, did you know that yesterday was National Hairball Awareness Day?  I do now, unfortunately.

I'd like to tout another very exciting and cool blog, under the GeneaBloggers umbrella:  GeneaWebinars.  There is a calendar widget on there that lists all upcoming "webinars", or online classes/seminars, many of which are FREE.  I was lucky enough to attend only one National Genealogical Society conference back in 1995, and I've craved and missed that for the last 16 years.  It so happened that I was married shortly after that and between finishing my degree and entering into my first and most beloved profession of motherhood (second only to genealogy) I haven't been able to afford, either financially, or as life went forward, time-wise, to go to another genealogy conference.  My time is coming.  But I was absolutely thrilled to discover these webinars because I can continue learning from home.

There is also a weekly radio broadcast at blogtalkradio. You can listen to back episodes for FREE, and I'm looking forward to adding that to my weekly educational and social calendar.

I'm really loving this new community and hopefully when things settle down in my personal life (aka finishing up the school year with five kids before mom goes crazy) I'll be able to delve even more into learning about the abundance of technological advances that have entered the scene since I was last really active in the online community of genealogy research.  I'm embarrassed to say the last time I was technologically savvy in that area, it was when newsgroups were the cool new "in" thing.  What's a newsgroup?  Yeah.  It's that old.  Thank you, THANK YOU, GeneaBloggers and Thomas MacEntee for such a wonderful resource.  I'm more fired up than I've been in a long time and ready to enter the 21st Century.

Follow Friday - Genealogy for Kids

I saw that someone else recommended Genealogy for Kids today, as well.  I found Jennifer Holik-Urban's blog, Generations, a month or so ago, and started following it and her Genealogy for Kids blog in my blog reader.  I started reading the Genealogy for Kids to see what tips I can find to help my kids as they start into their genealogical journeyings with me, and have found that there are some great tips for me, too.  One that I was pretty excited about was:

Tuesday's Tip - Research Question Checklist

Through her blogs, I discovered Geneabloggers, and I decided that I needed to start my own genealogy blog.  So.  Here we are!

Thankful Thursday - My Grandma

Grandma at her 90th birthday bash

I'd like to take this opportunity to say a big THANK YOU to my grandmother, Eva.  This amazing woman is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge, and has been one of my biggest resources when it comes to family history.  She'll be 91 years old next month, and she still remembers the most wonderful memories and stories about her own family and my grandpa's.  In face, she's probably the sharpest person I know.  My grandpa, Gene Rhinehart, saw me once when I was a baby, and died when I was a little girl. I never met his mother, Goldie Agatha Myers, she died long before I was born.  But because of my research and talking about them to Grandma "P", I feel a closeness and a relationship with them that all of you genealogists out there know what I'm talking about.

Besides her fountain of knowledge, she was also my biggest supporter in college and my early genealogy career.  She would drive one hour to pick me up from college, along with my dirty laundry, drive me an hour north to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, take my laundry home and wash and fold it, pick me back up, and drive me back to Provo.  Sometimes she would just sit and read next to me while I did hours of research.  And after all of that, she'd take me out to the Olive Garden and then grocery shopping.  She traded her Buick station wagon for a little car for me to drive.  And once I graduated and starting taking clients, she would watch my baby for me so I could spend more hours at the library, until I got too far along with my second child and had to give up professional research for a while.

For my graduation present from college, she gave me the Cambridge Glass Company glassware, with the Rosepoint design that my great-grandmother had etched herself, and which she had given to my grandma for her wedding.  She also gave me some beautiful crocheted doilies that her own mother had made.  She even let me borrow the beautiful brown dress with the suede collar and cuffs that she bought and wore for my grandpa when he was sent home with malaria from the Guadal Canal during World War II, for a Big Band era dance, even though my waist wasn't nearly as tiny as hers was and we both worried the old stitching might not hold (it did.)

She's endured tape- and video-recorded sessions for life story classes and papers, with me and my children, has been my friend and confidante, has inspired my children with a love for nature and birds and rocks and history, taken us on discovery outings, traveled with us on family trips, let us all camp at her house when we've come in from out of town, and been a lovely and wonderful person to know.  She still works out three times a week, "pumpin' iron", as she says, at the gym. And she always has cookies for us in her tupperware container. 

Thank you, Grandma!

Riding in a racecar on her 90th birthday

Welcome!

I've been wanting to start a genealogy blog for a long time, and today is the day!  First off, a little about me:  My name is Tiffany.  I love genealogy and family history!  I love learning about the past, about how historical events shaped and affected my ancestors lives.  I love the stories, the colorful, the heartache, the joy, the romance, and the every day details that filled up their lives.  I love that sense of self that I get as I learn more about the people who paved the way for me, it gives me a feeling that if they could endure, I can, too.  And it makes me look forward to my own children and grandchildren, and beyond.  What legacy will I leave for them?

Besides just being personally passionate about genealogy, I also earned my degree from Brigham Young University in 1996 in Family History/Genealogy, with an emphasis on US research.  I have spent the past 15 years doing personal research, as well as volunteer and paid research for others. I've also spent the past 15 years working on my own "family history", as a stay at home mom of five wonderful children.

My main goal for this blog is to share the stories and research I've gleaned from my family history discoveries, and to connect with other genealogists.  So, welcome to Who's Your Granddaddy!