Happy World Heritage Day on April 18!

What do you do when you are stuck and have been for a while? Reading my own blog entries, I would apply the new learning I am doing and see what I find. Sometimes that just doesn’t get me unstuck right away. What about you?

This morning, I was thinking, go look again, you need to “walk the talk” as they say. Then I thought, maybe I need a little recharge or “reboot” in tech terms. Maybe what I need is to look at someone I haven’t looked at for a long time and see if I find anything new. So that is my plan today. I will start with my 2x great grandfather on my dad’s paternal side and review the information I have, look for new hints to questions I have yet to answer in the information I have, and then look for at least 2 new resources in which I haven’t tried to find life stories for him yet.

Remember the phrase, “current level of awareness’? I hope that after 3 months of classes in 2025 alone that my current level of awareness is not the same as it was earlier in the year. When I look at previously seen information with new eyes, there is a chance that something new will appear. Perhaps a note on a census that I had glanced over or a sibling that I had ignored that may have a story to tell. It is the stories that I look for. Yes, I need the birth, marriage, death information but it is the living in between that I want to know and that is sometimes harder to find the further we go back. It may be in the history of the area or country and then knowing your ancestor’s role in that history so some of it may be educated guesses. Or the new information can lead us to the family that came before.

I think that is “indirect evidence!” What can I apply from this latest class? Oh, come on! You knew I was going to go there!

This class was great! I really appreciated the logical steps to the “Genealogical Proof” needed in support finding and verifying new information. Check out Debbie Wilson Smyth at Oak Trails Genealogy Services. She puts the steps in an easy to understand, logical form. It really is like putting together a “jigsaw puzzle.” Look at the FAN Club (Family, Associates, and Neighbors) Don’t forget to look at witnesses, executors, etc. If you put it together with the new set of eyes that I referred to earlier, we find more than we might think. It isn’t easy and it isn’t fast, so be patient.

Going back to my issue, my 2x great grandfather was John R Hartzell. I thought the R was for Rufus and always researched it that way. Looking at everything I had; I suddenly realized the R was for Roland. His son was John Rufus. Now things make sense. I just needed a new set of lenses!

Next month Google and R/E Deeds. Sign up yourself, your family and friends and join HQRL on your family history search.

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com