In honor of the Independence Day, I thought I’d create an inventory of what the families of my eight great-grandparents were doing on the 4th of July 1776. (Since the scope of my genealogy efforts includes my husband’s ancestry too, I’ll write about my husband’s eight greats in a...
Each year on November 11, we pause to remember those who served in our military. Here is the roll of the veterans in my affinity. In my generation (Vietnam and post-Vietnam): My husband Jere Gene Mackin, United States Navy My brothers-in-law Patrick Charles Mackin, United States Navy, and Richard...
Although I never lived there, Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, where my parents grew up, is very dear to me. Located in Schuylkill County in northeastern Pennsylvania, Tamaqua was a coal and railroad town. It was settled in 1799 by my ancestor Burkhardt Moser. Tamaqua has a historical society (of which one...
In a recent post I shared that my mother passed away in May of 2017. Her passing started a succession of sorting, finding new homes for, and sometimes discarding the objects that she had accumulated over her lifetime. Clothing came first, then clumps of papers, then caches of other...
In a previous post, I presented a number of ideas for pursuing alternative sources of information on the twentieth-century military service of an ancestor whose service record may have been destroyed in the 1973 National Personnel Records Center Fire–seeing whether a service record has been reconstructed or survived in...
