One of the most important reasons for researching family history is to create a deeper emotional connection to family by better understanding the lives and motivations of one's ancestors. Documentary evidence which fleshes out an ancestor's biography may be difficult to find unless the ancestor was socially prominent, politically active, or achieved notoriety for some reason. While most genealogists are familiar with church records in the form of baptismal registers and meeti

Old College View Seventh-day Adventist church about 1945-1946, corner of South 49th Street and Prescott Avenue. Today I feel compelled to preserve the memory someone I never met and few people in the College View community even remember anymore. The story starts in June 2015 when this picture, in water color with pencil, of the old College View Seventh-day Adventist Church shown above was given to the Union College Library Heritage Room. The donor claimed the picture was dr

After all of the time I spent on my Nantucket Origins post, I hadn't planned to write again so soon about my New England ancestors. Instead I planned to return to my Medical Cadet Corps research. As I develop my theoretical foundation for the MCC project, I'm exploring the roots of many Seventh-day Adventist pioneers and this research led me back to my own family in a surprising way. My great-great-grandfather, Daniel Cornell Wood, was the nephew of Ezra Cornell (see Nantuck

This week I received an inquiry requesting information about Mary Elizabeth Anderson (1887-1982) from a gentleman who believed she served as a missionary in Africa for about 35 years. He said she is buried in Wichita, Kansas. It appears he has been searching for more of Mary Elizabeth's history to no avail. He also thought there was a book about her, but he couldn't remember the title or author. This is the type of challenge I find irresistable and most satisfyingly, I turned

Reading and collecting information widely allows one to make surprising connections sometimes.