The brick wall that causes me lay awake at night is Peter Dill, my 5x-great-grandfather. He showed up out of nowhere in Georgia sometime in the 1790s, married a Quaker (Phebe Brown), witnessed his father-in-law’s will, bought some land and promptly sold it, then moved with his family to Ohio.
Happy New Year, 2026 Edition
Time for a “state of the genealogy” retrospective.
What Might Have Been!
I recently discovered that the FamilySearch library in Salt Lake City has name indexes for the Federal Land Tract Books. The tract books show all of the ownership claims for those federal lands that were made available for public purchase. Without a name index, the tract books are really difficult to use, so usually you […]
Life in Skoglösa
In the previous installment of the John Martinson Project, we examined the early childhood of Jöns Mårtensson. In this post, we’ll look his young adult years in the village of Skoglösa in his newly-adopted parish of Önnestad. This post is the sixth in the John Martinson Project series From birth to age 12, Jöns lived […]
Fun with photo metadata – NOT!
I have several ongoing projects related to scanning and archiving various family photo collections. I want my photo collections to be accessible, searchable, and easily shared. Using good metadata practices is the way to go but MAN is it hard to implement.
