Spring Update

The blog has been quiet lately…sometimes life gets in the way of genealogy.

First, we traveled with Mom and Dad to Hawaii for a glorious 10-day stay at Kapalua Bay. So wonderful to get away but it seems like for every one day you’re away from home, it takes two days to catch up when you get back.

Then I’ve had a couple of big projects this spring that have prevented me from doing much genealogy. One is the overhaul of the Swedish Genealogical Society of Colorado website. It was getting too big and too complicated, and it was too tricked out and kludgy for anyone else to manage. I moved it to a new server and a new platform (Squarespace) where it’s much cleaner and simpler to manage. I’m still updating a few of the older pages and posts and should have it complete by the end of the month.

Second is my own website. I got a bill for renewing the web hosting and it was almost $700! No thank you. So I had to move my main page (road13.com), this blog (which is now road13familyhistory.com), and the family tree (which is now road13genealogy.com) to a new hosting company (Hostinger). The whole thing was less than $100 and the user interface and overall speed is so much better. I should have done this years ago. This post is mostly a test to make sure everything is working as it should, including the notification emails that go out via MailChimp. I still need to review older posts and make sure links and photo galleries are working properly. So I’m sure there’s still some clean-up that I will need to do.

I think by June, I’ll be able to dive back into actual genealogy research again:

• I’ve found an intriguing DNA match on the Frasier side of the family that might hold clues for John Fraser‘s ancestry. 
• As part of an SGSC study group this fall, I’ll be doing deep research on Brita Olafsdotter. She is my 5x-great-grandfather on the Hanson side of my family. She is an ancestor that I haven’t researched much previously, but she comes from a parish with lots of excellent records – some going back to the late 1600s. This will be a challenging case because the old handwriting is difficult to read and interpret.
• I still have more follow-up and reporting to do on my new-found connection to the Emma Anderson family.
• The Swedish American Genealogist workshop is coming up at the end of October and I need to decide what my research project(s) will be.