Return of the Prodigal Son
The weekend might sound fairly ordinary, anticlimactic even. It was anything but. Dad finally met his brother, I met my cousins, and our whole view of who we thought we were has shifted.
Family Tree Firsts
Crash Landing
So, last week I attended Family Tree University’s Missouri Genealogy Crash Course webinar. Oh my gosh! If you’ve never taken one of these webinars you are definitely missing out.
Close Encounters of the Genealogical Kind
It was relatively easy to locate my cousin Alton Kent Blosser III. I dialed his number and waited nervously for Kent to come to the phone. I still had no idea if the Blosser family even knew about Dad. Turns out they didn’t. A.K. Blosser Sr. had quite literally taken that particular secret to his grave.
The Meddling Daughter
I’m sure Dad had questions about his father as he was growing up, but he didn’t learn the full story of his parentage until his grandmother “accidentally” left Dad’s birth certificate on the kitchen table one day. I’m not sure if the document contained his father’s name, but somehow Dad learned that his father’s name was Alton Blosser.
Indiana is Stalking Me
Those of you who have been following my journey with the Indiana Shivelys will appreciate this. As you know, I have started focusing on my father’s side of my tree. Most of Dad’s family, both maternal and paternal, have been in Missouri for several generations. (Can’t wait for the Missouri Genealogy Crash Course!) Last night I was on Ancestry.com [...]
The Case of the Missing Grandfather, part 1
Now that I’ve had such a great streak of luck recenty, it’s time to climb down my Shively tree for a while and head up my Allen tree. (But to everybody who’s left comments about the Shivelys on my posts, don’t let that stop you!) Growing up, I had an interesting assortment of grandparents on [...]
Genealogy is not Supposed to be this Easy
Even a newbie like me knows that genealogy takes patience and time. But apparently that doesn’t apply to the Shivelys, or at least not to this Shively.
The Mysterious Michael
Well I have finally finished scanning the photos from the Christmas albums! Whew! It takes some time to scan 100 photos! An interesting side effect of finding all these photos of my husband’s family. They have started to seem like real people to me. Before I started doing genealogy, if I thought about my ancestors at all, it [...]
Photo Mysteries
Now that Christmas is over, I’ve been busy scanning and uploading the photos to my Shively tree on Ancestry.com. Scanning the first album has presented some challenges, though.
A Christmas Miracle
About a month ago a gentleman who had just purchased an antique photo album on eBay contacted me via an Ancestry.com message. There were almost 50 photos in the album, all identified as Shivelys. Being a genealogist himself, he looked up the names on Ancestry, found my Shively tree and contacted me to let me know he was willing to re-sell it to me. My first reaction was, “Yeah, right. This has to be a scam.” But he sent me some scans of the photos, and I was gobsmacked.
