The last couple of months have been incredible. I cannot believe how quickly it has flown by. Then again they say time flies when you are having fun!
Back in April, I was working on the probate file of Willis Coffey. I have received more documents from the DeKalb County Historical Society. The short story is that when Willis passed away, the children from his first marriage went to court against the second wife and their half-brother from that marriage. It reads like a Lifetime Movie.
I was distracted from the drama of Willis Coffey for a couple of reasons. First, I was re-elected as President of the Marin County Genealogical Society. I am looking forward to another year of working with great people on our Board of Directors.
The second distraction is working with a friend on their family tree. One of our good friends (GG) needed help to work on his paternal line. He has tested his DNA to compare to a person we are pretty sure is related. I have been building the paper trail so when the results come in, there is a tree to work with. This project has been a blast! I am so lucky because GG’s family only arrived in the United States a few generations back. The gateway ancestor has a fairly uncommon name so tracing him back to Denmark was a breeze. From there I have found over 50 digital images of the family in the Ancestry.com Denmark Church Records.
The farthest ancestor for GG we have identified is Gregers Erichsen. His death record on 19 September 1746 states he is 77 years old. This gives us the earliest date of 1669 for this family. Just incredible!! Just thinking about it makes me happy all over again. I am so thankful for the time I got to flip through the church records and learn all about patronymic research.
My children got out of school in early June. We have been on one adventure after the next. We visited my parents in Virginia and my uncle and aunt in Seattle. Not too much genealogy research was accomplished in June but I was able to get a bunch of documents transcribed on the plane rides.
One of my biggest projects this summer has been to clean out our office and the top of my sewing table. My husband was shocked at the two black garbage bags of paper I was able to get rid of. Being liberated from all the clutter has led us to start using the office again. It also created specific piles of genealogy work to digitize and write about.
This month has had genealogy peek into the picture more than I thought it would. Look for a blog post about a previously unknown sister for my grandfather. I am also going to blog about my experiences with DNA testing. In the last month, the autosomal DNA results for both of my parents and one of my mother’s cousins has come in. I having been immersing myself in DNA education to figure out what it all means.
The rest of the summer includes more adventures with the kids. They are in dance camp this week, which has created time to write this blog post. Hopefully, I can keep my new schedule of 20 minutes a day to either scan, transcribe, or write something.
How is your summer going?