23 March 2011

Big & Little Things I've Been Doing

Big Thing
I regret my recent absence from the genealogy blogosphere, but I know you'll understand.  Ah, it feels so good to again sit at my computer and breathe ....  We are caregivers for our dear neighbor.  He'll be 85 next month.  He's retired, career Navy and, oh, the stories he has told, including having been on a ship off Japan for both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  He's been very independent until March 9, long story short: ER, hospital, surgery, skilled nursing, and now we are planning the next step.  I have had the privilege of giving him all the time I could these last two weeks.  Things are better now, but I don't know when my blogs will be regular again.

Relatively Teeney Little Thing
With just a bit of "free" time now, I sat down and started on the accumulated blog postings in Reader.  Wow, people have been very, very busy, ..., there are hundreds to read...  I don't know if I'll ever get caught up.

I say a recent post at Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings
on how to make these personalized maps for blogs.  He credited Becky Jamison and Sheri Fenley with leading him to it.  It's so easy that I made this one in just a few moments.  The BigHugeLabs webpage really is incredibly easy to use! 



Some of these states were very short stays for my ancestors.  I can probably add Illinois (great-grandparents had one child born there, I think on the way to a South Dakota / Minnesota border town) and New York (4th great-grandfather owned land there, but I haven't proven he lived there).

It strikes me that my ancestors lived in at least 20 states, yet if I made a map for my husband's ancestors, it would only show New York and Italy before that.  If I made one for our dear neighbor's ancestors, it would only show Pennsylvania and Germany before that.

How different we all are ....