My grandmother, Jeanette Shrum Willett, left us a wonderful handwritten manuscript of her life which she wrote in the mid 1980’s. She was born August 4, 1897 in Bloomington, Indiana and died March 3, 1988 in Salem, Massachusetts. I have been transcribing her manuscript here. You can start from the beginning with Part 1. In…
My grandmother, Jeanette “Jenny” Shrum Willett, left us a wonderful handwritten manuscript of her life which she wrote in the mid 1980’s. She was born August 4, 1897 in Bloomington, Indiana and died March 3, 1988 in Salem, Massachusetts. I have been transcribing her manuscript here. You can start from the beginning with Part 1….
When my grandmother, Jenny, was in her 80’s, my cousin Leigh encouraged her to write down her personal stories so that the family would always have it. My grandmother wrote one journal for Leigh’s mother, Jean, and one journal for my mother, Lee. Always practical and thrifty, she used two old calendar books. The…
I came out to California for a few extra days before attending the Southern California Genealogical Society’s annual Genealogy Jamboree, because I was doing some genealogy look-ups for someone back home. That included visiting a few cemeteries. I love cemeteries, if you didn’t know. Fun fact about me. My task took me to Holy Cross…
I was excited when I saw this topic being offered at Jamboree. And I was even more excited when I saw who was giving the talk – Jean Wilcox Hibben. I’ve seen Jean give other talks before. She is engaging, straightforward and a wealth of knowledge. I’m pretty interested in this topic, which probably doesn’t…
I am in California this week for the Southern California Genealogical Society’s annual Genealogy Jamboree. I love this conference because it is so extremely well run and has very many of the same wonderful and dynamic speakers that you would find at the national conference level. This weekend I’m looking forward to hearing sessions by…