Hello  Alice. Welcome to the forum.Where in AZ do you live? I am in Sun City.

Welcome Alice!  
what kind of quilting do you like to do?

i teach some quilting, but enjoy Bargellos, paperpiecing, and piecing in general!

hopefully others will chime here about themselves!

We used to get ours refilled at Costco, but the one we go to doesn't do it any more. DH did find some reasonable ones on Amazon.  

I have found a lot of family history and found cousins I didn't know I had on findagrave.com.  Sometimes they leave contact information and you may be able to contact or visit with them.  I'm sure you already know about that site!  I found photos of headstones with some names and dates information too, and that's how I found some cousins, because they are the ones who posted the photos and some other birth and death dates, etc.  Of course, some stuff from findagrave.com should be verified using census and other information in the official records, but it can sure be helpful sometimes, and a good place to start.  

I am also interested in the findagrave.com feature of publishing GPS coordinates for specific gravesites.  Of course, whether that is available may depend upon the kindness of strangers.  Usually a person needs to actually be standing right at the gravesite and enter the coordinates, but I understand there are many people who are doing that now to build up the database of cemetery information.  They used to just take photos and document names and dates, but now they are also adding the GPS info.  Such a wonderful thing being done by people who are interested in documenting cemeteries.  If you ever DO get a chance to visit a distant cemetery, it should make finding a specific grave much easier.  

Wow, what an organized way to move into a new place!  My place is MUCH smaller, and I am *still* unpacking boxes and trying to find a place for everything.  Of course, you have the great advantage of two very efficient "engineers," and your family is always so organized.  Wow!  I am looking forward to seeing photos and following everything you still have to do to get moved out of your old place and into the new one.  Everything sounds great!  

I would love to have a place big enough that my whole family could live there -- not the same house, but you know, a big ranch-like area with separate residences.  How wonderful for you all.  

Speaking of retreat, should we be getting a notice of when we can send our entries in??

 I am here in Oklahoma with no power,  amazing how dark it gets with no lights!!

AliceRosner said:

new to AZ

member of Delta quilters Brentwood Ca

Have you just moved to Arizona??   cuz I live just down the highway from you in Walnut Creek, CA!

Welcome!

First rule:  **do not blindly believe** other people's trees.  It's easy to get names mixed up.  Or dates.  Or misread something.  Or just plain have something WRONG.

Absolutely, look at everyone else's family trees but VERIFY to your own satisfaction that the people in those trees are the ones in your family.  Even if the tree was created by a long-known first cousin and you absolutely, positively KNOW she is your first cousin, VERIFY her information before you put it in your tree.

I have come across a circle of 7 trees that had parentage for a person I was also looking for.  I was delighted!  Except when I discovered that NONE of those trees had any sources for the parentage and they simply copied each other.  Ugh.

And then there was another tree that had parentage and I was ecstatic!  Until further research revealed that the parentage on the other tree couldn't possibly be true because some of their dates were simply inconsistent with what I knew to be facts.  Then I discovered that the father figure was the same first & last name but different middle name .. plus the inconsistent dates.    That other tree had an entire ancestral branch that wasn't of the family at all.  It was very disappointing.

Census can provide some very illuminating information!  Relations can be known by first names one time and their middle name another time.  Did someone disappear from a census?  Maybe they died.  Maybe a woman got married and now lives with her husband's household with his surname.  Maybe a son grew up and moved away.  Remember to check the whereabouts of SIBLINGS from the census.  Although siblings are not in your directly ancestral line, it's interesting to see how close family members lived to each other.

DO NOT GET HUNG UP ON IN-LAWS!!!.   Let me repeat that:   the spouse of a sibling, aunt, uncle, great aunt/uncle, etc ARE NOT related to you.  If they were never in your family tree, YOUR ancestors would exactly the same.  So, at least initially, DO NOT go down the rabbit hole of researching spouse-in-laws!   Let's say your brother married.  His wife is NO relation of yours, so don't waste your time on researching HER ancestors too.  They don't relate to you at all.   Now the spouse of your grandfather .. absolutely!  Without the grandmother, YOU wouldn't even be here, so you gotta research her line.  But her siblings' spouses?  NOPE, no way.  Leave them alone.  You don't have time for that.  :-)

I'm sure you've discovered a way to find all/most of the siblings of a mother.  When you do a search looking for births, put in the surname of the child, put in the maiden name of the mother.  Leave everything else blank because you don't KNOW the names or the birth year or even the birth location of all the kids.  Just because child 1 was born in City X, doesn't mean than any siblings will have been born there also.  With just that minimal information, you'll get a number of hits.  Now, just because the mother's maiden name and the child's surname match your search, LOOK at the birth years.  If they are 50 years apart, they probably are not siblings.  But if the difference in birth years is "reasonable" (in my case, I am 7 years apart from each of my brothers), then you very well might have found all the siblings.   Double check where they lived at those birth years with the location on the birth record to verify that this is the right child/mother combination and you're not getting someone else's people.

As Jonna mentioned, Find A Grave is fantastic.  Be sure and read through the entire screen because there could be other relatives mentioned.  If you can't find the information you want directly, go through one of the relations to see if the relation's tree (from another family member) mentions anything about your person.

I'm at a point where I think I've found everyone that can be found on both my Mom & Dad's side.  Most of the time I don't have photos.  Most of the time all I have are "just the facts, m'am" ... birth, marriage, children, death.  I've hit a brick wall on my dad's side.  The information just hasn't been digitized for me to find.  The information could be in paper form that I would need to take a road trip out of the country  to see ... and I'm not going to be doing that.

Have you looked at your DNA matches??  I've figured out some relations (2nd/3rd cousins) and have emailed them, asking them (very politely) if they would be interested in seeing who our common ancestor was.  I hope, but don't except a reply.  I've even emailed 2nd/3rd cousins who I KNOW are related to me .. because I KNOW who the common or related ancestor is .. and in those cases, I cite the person so they know I'm actual family and not some weirdo stranger. (Yes, I know I'm still a weirdo person, but they don't need to find that out until later, if at all.  :-)  ).    Sometimes the cousin is interested in pursuing the line of questioning, sometimes not.  MOST of the time, I am the one who has most of the information, which is disappointing.  What is really disappointing is when the cousins don't even have any photographs they are willing to share.  I really like photos of my ancestors and relations.

But, it *is* fascinating.

You are so right about double checking information and not going down the in law rabbit hole.   I have a cousin who has a HUGH tree...his great grand father and my great grandfather were brothers...some of the info in his tree is not correct and some is iffy, and he has in-law info so it's hard to follow.

My aunt started researching her family history before the internet, her advise is trust your gut, if it doesn't seem right it probably isn't and if it does even if you can't find documentation it probably is.  Her interest was picked when she and each of her nine siblings recieved a check from a distance aunt.  The check was for about nine hundred, but it is said that if the lawyers hadn't had to search so long and hard for one missing relative those checks would have been closer to five thousand.  I have no idea how many cousins got checks to but quite a few.

Jo

Love paper piecing

do a lot of scrap piecing strip piecing on used dryer sheets for stabilizing. 
CA guild and local club made donation quilts   
Yetta introduced me To this group and it is fun sharing ideas and learning new things.