Five We Like: Another week of family history goodies

There’s a lot of good family history information available on the Internet. Here are five places we’ve enjoyed visiting recently:

Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History. “The night my grandfather tried to kill us, I was five years old, the age I stopped believing in Santa Claus, started kindergarten, and made real rather than imaginary friends.” That’s just one sentence of Helene Stapinski’s book about growing up in Jersey City. “People didn’t settle in Jersey City,” writes Stapinski, “they settled for Jersey City.”

Antsy McClain - Falling in Love in America. Some will find this country-tinged YouTube video to be on the sappy side, but it effectively weaves old family photos with its uplifting lyrics. Worth a visit.

Blaze devours family history but not family spirit. A sad tale of how Richard Beck rescued a cache of family history from an uncertain future only to have it erased by fire as he was hundreds of miles away, recreating a cross-country journey by his grandparents.

Davina’s old postcards inspire a family history. Trevor Harris was on holiday in a small English village when he bought 36 old postcards from a shop. It wasn’t the pictures on the front that drew his attention – it was the messages on the back. After a bit of research, Harris turned his find into a book.

Only The Good: Tracing Family History. Shelly Kneupper Tucker’s folksy blogging style is always a fun read. In this post she writes of her love-hate relationship with her de facto role as her family’s historian.

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo courtesy of dedrawolff.

Comments

[This Eclectic Life]

Thanks for the kind words, Larry! You know I appreciate you.

[Apple]

Thanks for introducing me to Antsy McClain!

Apple