Heartland Genealogy

Last week’s Friday Find featured a document I obtained years ago from the Social Security Administration: the original  SS-5 application for Percy Ernest Crawford (1893–1978) . That application provided exactly the kind of details genealogists love to uncover—Percy’s full name, birth date, birthplace, parents’ names, residence, and even his employment status at the time he applied for a Social Security number. But finding a document is only part of the genealogical process. The next step is making sure that document is available to others researching the same family. As genealogists, many of us have files tucked away in notebooks, filing cabinets, hard drives, and computer folders—records we gathered years ago for a specific research question. Those documents may contain clues that could help cousins, descendants, or other researchers, but if they stay in our private files, they remain effectively hidden. That thought prompted me to do something with Percy’s SS-5 a...

Are you a WikiTree user? If so, how much of your tree is actually represented there? While I have most of my RootsMagic database linked to the FamilySearch tree and reflected in my public tree on Ancestry, I have to admit that only a small portion of that work has made its way onto WikiTree’s collaborative tree. Those missing profiles are exactly why I signed up for my second WikiTree Connect-A-Thon. Going into the weekend, I had a clear goal: add the deceased descendants of my 4th great-grandfather, James Crawford. I wanted to focus specifically on the lines that had not yet been represented, helping to connect more of my family to the larger, shared tree. However, the weekend didn’t unfold quite as planned. Mother Nature had other ideas. Heavy rains to our south on Thursday and Friday turned our normally calm river into a raging torrent. That surge of water damaged a regional fiber line, knocking out both our internet and cell service just for most of Saturday. ...