The Mississippi Legislature adopted resolution SC 593 on March 5, 2015, mourning the loss of Henry Outlaw, my 2nd cousin, 1x removed. The resolution recognizes the remarkable career of one of Mississippi’s beloved sons who passed away February 21, 2015. An award-winning academic, Dr. Outlaw taught chemistry at Delta State University from 1966 until 2002. His numerous contributions to this school, its students and faculty cannot be summarized easily. In 2014, his “retirement” culminated with his becoming the first recipient… More →

My cousin Hallie is a person and not just a DNA match. While that might seem obvious, after a dozen or more emails exchanged the only thing we had learned about each other is how we might be related. Our suspected common ancestors have the same last names and came from the same part of Europe blah blah blah. I fully intended to introduce Hallie within this context and had… More →

One of my favorite ways to identify cousins I never knew I had is through “Google Alerts”. Essentially, this is a free tool that scours the web looking for new content that contains keywords that are of interest to me. In my case, the keywords are the relevant surnames that appear throughout my family tree. When the tool finds a match, it alerts me by sending an email. I receive… More →

I am grateful that my parents did not name me Martin Trantham. There’ve been enough of them already. I think my mother summed up the problem of there being too many of them perfectly when she wrote “…one can easily become overwhelmed with all the information and misinformation which circulates regarding all the Martin Tranthams…”. She was very wise and I should have… More →

I opted to steer clear of images of the iconic cars that bear the Duesenberg family name and head in a less obvious direction for the first official entry on Fred and August Duesenberg, my 1st cousins, 3x removed. More than one hundred years after their introduction, Duesenberg automobiles still show up in the headlines thanks in large part to avid collector Jay Leno and… More →

Tracing my Wessel roots has been a bit of a challenge beyond my 3rd great grandparents. Fortunately I’ve met a Wessel cousin (DNA-matched!) and kindred spirit through Ancestry.com who shares my passion for family research. We’re both on the trail of our common Wessel ancestors. Marsha Fitzgibbon, my 4th cousin, 1x removed, is a direct descendant of Elise “Eliza” (Wessel) Giese Theermann, who came to America in… More →

In 1859, my 4th great grandfather, Jesse Trantham, purchased 120 acres of land in Greene County, Arkansas. He packed up his belongings, his 2nd wife and his large family and he left Tennessee. My mother speculated that he made this move attempting to avoid the “looming war between the states”. Things must have been getting tense in Tennessee. Jesse’s brother Robert… More →

Digitized collections of historic newspapers are becoming more and more available on the Internet. Most of the websites that offer these treasure troves of genealogical information charge some type of fee. But, the convenience of being able to search from your own home usually makes it worth the price. Plus, character recognition software coupled with modern-day indexing makes finding the name of that long-lost relative buried deep… More →