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Writer’s Block–How to Stop Making Excuses and Start Writing Your Personal History

Most people don't create a personal history but YOU should. Every life matters and we can all learn from your experiences. Getting started may be the hardest part. If you have writer's block, here's some advice on how to stop making excuses and start writing your personal history. You can laugh or you can cry. Lighten up. We're all insecure about our voice, written or recorded. Some of us even stress over creating an answering machine prompt Or panic when invited to leave a message Tell stories about things that kids today don't even understand Tell stories about how poor you were. There's so much affluence today, your childhood stories might be an eye-opener Share stories about how you were raised Get inspired! Listen to other people's stories and histories. Here are some links to Oral Histories you can watch or listen to online. Here's a site…

Are We Cousins? How to determine your degree of cousinship with a DNA Match

There are tons of relationship charts floating around the web and they each serve a useful purpose... but ISOGG, the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, has a simple formula for understanding and naming your fundamental relationship to another person. This isn't intended for direct line relationships, Parent-Child, Grandparent-Grandchild or even some collateral line relationships such as Aunt-Niece, Uncle-Great Nephew, etc. It works, but those relationships are already nicely named.* This formula is for all types of collateral line cousins; DNA matches you don't quite know how to name. You may need to draw a family tree to diagram your relationship with another person. With that in hand, the ISOGG Wiki formula will tell you your degree of cousinship. A family tree diagram showing my relationship to a recent DNA match. We're both related to my great-great-grandfather. He's my great-grandmother's sister's s…

French Parish Registers Online

French Parish Registers (FR: Registres paroissiaux) are church records of births, marriages, and burials in France and many of these French Parish Registers are now available for free, online. Parish records predate government or civil records of births, marriages, and deaths and are often the only available record of these events. In 1792, after the French Revolution, when the law prescribed that civil records of births, marriages, and deaths be kept and banned priests from keeping these records (between 20 September 1792 and 8 April 1802), some priests continued to secretly record baptisms, marriages, and burials and many of these registers have been preserved. These registers can provide valuable information - and open new avenues for research in case of blockages - with the mention of godparents, witnesses of religious marriage, burial. * Parishes were the basic unit of church organization and also functioned in later years as a level of gove…