Friday Findings: Magazines and a Bonanza

I haven't done Friday Findings in a while, and am hoping to get back on track with it. It's a great way to keep track of any research I've done or discoveries I've made over the past week.

I received the September 2009 issue of Family Tree Magazine and the July/August 2009 issue of Discovering Family History. Both have great articles, as usual, and they both had articles on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). NARA is the focus of FTM's web guides series, and DFH had an article on NARA field branches.

In an earlier post this week, I mentioned how my uncle had arrived from Western Michigan for a surprise 65th birthday party for my mother last weekend. He brought two packages of photos and documents, one for me and one for Mom. I am scanning Mom's stuff now to return to her when we visit for the annual Robbins' Fourth of July barbecue. It's been a challenge, since my main computer has been down for a month, I can't get my scanner's software to load on my daughter's fast laptop with lots of hard drive space, and my own sluggish laptop is almost out of room (I had to go through and do a lot of deleting of unnecessary files and cropping of .tif photo files to allow enough hard drive space to finish scanning).

The photos are mostly formal ones of Mom, her mother, and her grandmother, although there are many snapshots. There are also my grandparents' senior yearbooks, my grandmother's high school diploma, and some snapshots of my own childhood. There are also some photos from my (step) grandfather's family, and I'm honored that they are passing into my hands. I look forward to eventually highlighting a lot of these photos on some Wordless Wednesday posts.

I also heard from a HOLST relative (my paternal grandmother's adoptive surname) I've corresponded with in the past who may have some copies of photos to pass on to me. Also, a descendant of Silas YORK got back in touch with me. There's a possibility that my brick wall ancestor Jeremiah F. YORK is related and we've been knocking on this wall for many years. Last, I heard from a distant DICKINSON relative who told me of a family reunion in June 2010 in Massachusetts.

There's been a lot of news from genealogy websites this past week, and I just haven't had time to get the press releases on my blog. Many of them have to be reformatted to fit the post, which is time-consuming. I wish they'd get e-mailed to me in .txt format instead of HTML!