All posts by Meaghan E.H. Siekman

Researching Your African American Family

1850 United States Slave Schedule, Familysearch.org

Black History Month is a great time to get inspired to research your family’s unique contributions to American History. African American genealogical research has distinctive challenges but can also produce..

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It's a small world

I come from a long line of family historians, and we are always brainstorming ideas to get other family members interested in our ancestors. My mission this year was to spark an interest in my four-year-old cousin (soon to be five, as she will tell me). She may be too..

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Family Ghosts

The Bump Tavern. Courtesy of The Farmers' Museum

October is a magical month when the leaves turn brilliant colors and start decorating the ground as the nights get cooler and darker. No wonder it is a time filled with hearty food, hot cider, and spooky stories told..

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Insights from my great-grandmother's diary

If your family is anything like mine, you heard plenty of stories about your great-grandparents from your parents. From those stories I have been able to get a sense of their personalities and how they lived, but it is a view limited to how my parents knew them as..

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Musings from the Catskills

"The Farm," 17 October 2009

I spent my childhood at our family home in the Catskill Mountains in New York. My roots in the Catskills date back to the mid-eighteenth-century, when the first of the Holdridge line of my family appeared in the area. As far as we can..

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