Moving Stories In late 2007, I was sitting with a letter from my landlord that my rent was going up, watching a news story about how drastically house prices had dropped. A few months later I was buying my first house. “My little house” has been my home, my office, my base for over 13 years. If […]
The Dog Days of Summer I have often heard this saying; it always conjures up images of days too hot to move. But according to the Farmers’ Almanac, “The phrase is actually a reference to the fact that, during this time, the Sun occupies the same region of the sky as Sirius, the brightest star visible […]
You Are Your Brand I am part of a Women’s Business Bridge connection group. Four professional women sharing ideas, struggles, and accountability. Recently I was telling them the story and meaning of my new tattoo. My grandmother’s last words, “and then where are we going”, in her handwriting. When Kristina of Kristina Lynn Photography said “I love it, […]
If you have taken the Ancestry DNA test you might know that they recently updated their reference samples and your results may have changed. Your DNA didn’t change, just the nationalities they attribute to different segments. The first time I took the test I was 19% Irish. I wasn’t surprised, as I have found many […]
How are we related? As we gather for the holidays, we will be spending time with family: parents, siblings, grandparents, and “cousins”. One of the questions I am asked most is about cousins? What is a 1st or 2nd cousin and what’s with the whole “removed thing”? The first thing you need to know is […]
Is social media new? I have been working on an article for the Minnesota Genealogist about my second great grandmother, Minnie House. An excellent source for piecing together her complicated story has been newspapers.com. As I searched for her name in the years and locations she once lived, I had to laugh at the results of lines from […]
You can’t go back… In my early twenties I worked at Paisley Park Studios for the artist Prince. As you can imagine it was an interesting experience. I often tell people, and Anne Hathaway’s character says in the Devil Wears Prada, “I learned a lot”. It was a very different life from what I live now. […]
Grandpa Don was the subject of my first personal history video, which I made for his and Grandma Ethel’s 60th anniversary. He didn’t say much, preferring to let her tell the stories. Until he was able to tell me about his cars. He had a list of every car he ever owned with what he […]
Ethel Schwartz was not my biological grandmother, but from the first time we met she decided to be “Grandma Ethel.” She taught me to make Christmas cookies, and not lick the spoon while frosting them. To send thank you notes and to change the water in cut flowers every day to make them last longer. […]
When I took the ancestry.com DNA test a few years back, I was expecting to be quite a bit German. All of my paternal grandmother’s grandparents were born in Germany. I also have many other lines where Germans appear. When I opened my results, German wasn’t even an option, it was lumped in with all of Western […]