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Tomorrow, through the magic of technology and hosted by FamilySearch, I will realize a dream, being at rootstech Connect.
Today I will select the livestream and videos that interest me and add them to my Playlist. If I cannot watch them over the next few days, they will be available for access for the entire next year!!!
Are you interested too? Here is the link to their YouTube channel website tutorials
I’m especially interested in the Show My Relatives feature, a sort of matching program that will let participants know if another attendee’s tree shows ancestors you may share in common. This should be exciting!
Please let me know if you are joining this amazing event as well. I hope rootstech Connect will be a springboard and inspiration for genealogists, family historians, story tellers and record keepers throughout the world!
Debbie Reed Hutchison
txwordweaver@yahoo.com
As I watched our grandson practice “long tones” on his clarinet, I realized what an important place music has had in our family over the generations. Musicians in our family have hummed, whistled and sang through the years. They have played a long line of instruments including guitar, ukulele, drums, xylophone, violin, recorder, flute, clarinet, saxophone, piano and accordion. It’s so true, music unites our family 🎼

This is one of my favorite photos of my mother, Otha Beauchamp Reed, born in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Her family was not enumerated in the 1930 United States census when she was just a girl herself, and I hope to find out where they were living that year to tie up some loose ends in our family history.
This is my challenge, my course of action for the year, my exercise regimen, day in and day out. Hopefully my reward will be to develop a powerful new habit that will make me stronger in all aspects of my life.

My father, Willard William Reed was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I was told that his family moved around as part of crop harvesting and they were living in Canada when he was born for that reason.
My first goal for 2020 is to request his Canadian birth record and to locate the house they lived in from the information on the 1921 Canadian census.

My great grandfather Thomas Reed (1843-1917) was listed as a farmer living in Indiana and Nebraska in the US Census records of 1870, 1880, 1900 and 1910. His father, Ezekiel Reed (1818-1891) farmed in Indiana as well according to the US Census records of 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880.
With all this in mind, it should be logical to believe the family story my father told that his father, my grandfather Marion William Reed (1870-1951) was a laborer who worked with a group that went from state to state harvesting whatever was ready to pick, pull, pluck or scythe.
That might also explain why their family moved from Indiana, where my grandfather was born, to Nebraska where he met and married Elizabeth Lillian Gotto, my grandmother, to Calgary, Canada where my father was born, to Colorado, Washington and back to Colorado where he is listed on the 1940 census as a farmer.
It must have been hard to follow the crop harvesting cycle, taking temporary jobs in the off season and moving your wife and nine children across country. However, in the early 1900s, times were economically challenging for everyone and I’m proud to see how resourcefulness and following the harvest helped my family survive.

When we visited Hodgenville, KY on a genealogy research trip, we were fortunate to meet Carol in the LaRue County Kentucky Genealogy Society and the great staffers in the LaRue County Public Library. All of these fine folks were so instrumental in guiding our travels through the county roads and through the cemeteries there.
The 1899 map above was a key find, charting the location of farms in the area listed by the names of the landowners in 1899. So many of the names in the county were familiar to us from our family tree. Seeing where they lived made these ancestors come alive once more!

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 2: Challenge
Because my New Year’s resolution was to keep in touch with my DNA matches, it should not have been a surprise when I went to my Ancestry Message Center and found that notes from my “cousin matches” had been piling up.