Carnival of Genealogy 81: The day the geneablogs died

Tracing the Tribe is hosting its first Carnival of Genealogy, and sincerely thanks geneacolleagues for sending in such interesting posts.

A special shout-out to footnoteMaven for her theme badge (see right).

Please remember that this was a virtual exercise – no blog sustained injuries or died during this 81st edition of the Carnival of Genealogy. Certified blog wranglers were present at all times to provide proper care.

Keeping in tune with the times, here’s Tracing the Tribe’s entry a la Twitter for the 81st Carnival of Genealogy:

ICYMI twitty cre8v fab 1st jugen blog TTT ded 2day @3+yo.b2006 w/2500 posts.#10 pop genblog + honors.J/K.L8R 4mor

In case you can’t read it, ask any 10-year-old. If you don’t have one handy, here’s a translation:

In case you missed it, the witty, creative, fabulous first Jewish genealogy blog Tracing the Tribe died today at 3-plus years of age. Born in 2006 and with 2,500 posts, it was the #10 ranked most popular genealogy blog and had other honors. Just kidding. Later for more.

There was even room for nine more characters!

Okay, back to our geneablogger colleagues. Some carnivals list submissions in alpha order or in a very subjective best-first. Tracing the Tribe will list them as they arrived. Do read all of them!

Amir Dekel: R.I.P. Dream-of-Genea at I Dream of Genea(logy). Amir’s work is always good for a giggle. I’m still grinning over this one.

The ‘I Dream of Genea(logy)’ blog died earlier this morning at about 5:30am in a private sector of underused disk space in the Blogger.com hosting facility. It was just a little over one year old at time of death and cause of death has not yet been determined although it is highly likely that the young blog died of boredom and neglect by its owner. Proper archiving and burial will take place later this evening and the final resting place will be at the owner’s external backup HD device. …

Sharon Klein: Thanks For The Memories at Genealogy. Sharon reported on how her deceased blog helped her connect with bloggers and family members and how two cousins found her while Googling for a mutual cousin. She’s not going anywhere – she’s hooked on geneablogging!

Earline Bradt: COG #81 – A Short But Full Life at Ancestral Notes. Earline covers the short life of her blog, ending with:

…Ancestral Notes can be viewed in the Google cache anytime, day or night. Private cremation of remains. Donations can be made to the Genealogy database of your choice in lieu of flowers.

Apple: What Is and What Could Be at Apple’s Tree. Apple wrote a 2019 obit when her blog’s circulation was 250 million, and a GeneaVillage Gazette editorial dated December 2009:

I have been unhappy with Apple’s Tree for several months now and perhaps I’ve been a little hard on myself – but only a little. Writing about what could be will hopefully point me back in the right direction. This was a very interesting exercise and harder to write than I thought it would be.

Ken Spangler: COG #81 ? Blog Obituaries at Beyond Fiction. Hopefully, this won’t happen soon but just in case, this is what would be on my blog!

…Arrangements have been made for the blog to continue to stay online for at least another year or so. No new posts will be added but those who would like to take one last look at Ken’s writings will have an opportunity to do so. After that, it will be left to the descendants of Ken Spangler to continue his quest.

Bill West: “WiNG-NUTS MOURN GENEABLOG’S PASSING” at West in New England. Although Bill claims this was a hard one to figure out, I’m still laughing:

… Rumor has it that a secret society of devotees known as WiNG-nuts are decrying the early demise of WiNG and some claim it’s not dead but merely the victim of a vast conspiracy of town hall clerks.

But whatever the case, we bid farewell to “West in New England” with a softly murmured “Well done, o good and faithful geneablog…”

footnoteMaven: The Day footnoteMaven’s Blog Died at footnoteMaven. fM’s work is always evocative, as her piece on Big Blue Bird demonstrates:

… The blog struggled for time, eventually succumbing to a vociferous bird, by the name of Twitter;

Twitter fed on time. And thus, it consumed all fM had left, until the blog was no more.

And only the memories remained…

Jasia: Creative Gene’s Obituary (COG #81) at Creative Gene. Jasia, the COG Queen, covered her blog’s life and beginnings, her heritage and more.

… Creative Gene is survived by an extensive network of genealogy blogs written by friends ….

Jessica Oswalt: If Something Were To Happen … at Jessica’s Genejournal. Her piece detailed her back-up plan in case her blog were to disappear. Good advice!

John Newmark: Writing a Blog Obituary posted at TransylvanianDutch. Rumors are that the cause of death for TransDutch was beverage-related:

… The Coroner’s Report is uncertain about cause of death. There are rumors that a programmer in Mountain View, California spilled a glass of orange juice on the servers and the bits and bytes containing two years worth of data were lost in a second. Author, John Newmark, hadn’t backed up the posts. …

Contributions should be sent to the Dead Blog Fund.

Leslie Mehana: RIP Genea-Rooter: You Made a Good Start at Rooting Around Genealogy.

… But buck up, old girl, you made your Wordless Wednesdays, you added some wisdom to the search. Better luck next time. …

Randy Seaver: Genea-Musings dies – blogger goes… at Genea-Musings. Randy asks: When a blog dies, what happens to the blogger? Vacation? Funny Farm? Rest and recuperation? Back to real life? All of the above? Are there enough beds at the Farm for all of us?

…the writer of Genea-Musings was admitted today to the Geneaholic wing of the Geneabloggers Sunnybrook Farm in Salt Lake City, Utah for rest and rehabilitation. His lovely wife is there with him… trying to pry his fingers off the wornk eyboard thatk eeps makingt ypographic error sin everyp ost. He just keeps repeating “Control-C, Control-V, spell check, damn fingers, genealogical proof standard, it’s not all on the internet, Ancestry is…, they’re coming to take my blog away! it’s Carnival time, Saturday Night Genealogy Fun rocks…”

What comes next? It’s the call for submissions for the 82nd edition of the Carnival of Genealogy, of course. The deadline for entries is October 15. So sharpen your virtual pencils and get ready to write:

The guest host is Kathryn Doyle of the California Genealogical Society and Library blog, and the topic is:

What’s your favorite genealogical society?
Do you belong to a society?
Tell us why! Or if not, why not?

Kathryn’s COG will be the inaugural edition of the all-new GenSo Blog Carnival, which will focus strictly on genealogical societies and will begin in January 2010. She’ll provide more details about the GenSo Carnival in her post, so stay tuned for more.

Carnival of Genealogy: An unusual topic, October 1

Some time ago, Tracing the Tribe wrote a post entitled “If your blog died today.”

The idea came from ProBlogger Darren Rowse, who asked “If your blog died today, what would it be remembered for?”

Jasia of Creative Gene – our Carnival of Genealogy Queen – ran with the idea and Tracing the Tribe is hosting the 81st edition of the COG:

“Your Genealogy Blog’s Obituary: If your blog ended or was lost/deleted today, how would you write its obituary?

What were the highlights of your blog?

What is its history?”

The deadline for submissions is October 1. Submit your blog article to the 81st Carnival of Genealogy using the carnival submission form.

Darren’s post was a two-part assignment which will provide more input. Here are some questions that might help:

– What do you want people to say about your blog?
– How do you hope it will have been perceived?
– What will people miss about it the most?
– What ground has it broken?
– What has it achieved?
– How has it helped people?
– Write an obituary for your blog as you think others see it now.
– What would they say about it?
– What would people miss about it?
– What has it achieved?
– How has it fulfilled a need or service in people’s lives?
– What ground has it broken?

Tracing the Tribe is rubbing its virtual hands in glee over the prospect of reading all your submissions.

Remember to please use a descriptive phrase in the title of any articles you plan to submit and/or write a brief description/introduction to your articles in the “comment” box of the blog carnival submission form. This will give readers an idea of what you’ve written about and interest them in clicking on your link.

Thank you to footnoteMaven for creating the excellent 81st COG badge above.

I’m looking forward to reading your posts.

My mother, the genius!

“Of course, you can have a horse,” said my mother. “It just has to sleep under your bed!”

My mother was a genius in more ways than one, although her real talent was in situations like the “horse issue.” When I became horse-mad, as many girls do at some point, I wanted a horse.

Now, where was such a four-footed creature supposed to live in a Brooklyn brownstone? How would it get up the outside stairs or to the second floor bedrooms?Obviously, we hadn’t thought it out carefully. But what was important was that Mom said we could have one. It wasn’t her fault that the horse couldn’t possibly fit under our bed. We even measured it!

It’s a good thing we didn’t know about today’s lofted beds, which would have provided at least a miniature pony-friendly environment.

“Of course, you two can have a piece of cake. One of you cuts it and the other one gets first pick.” We pulled out the rulers and slide rules on that one. If computers had been around then, we’d have found a computer program to calculate the angle of the cut and the volume of the cake. God forbid that the other person should get one crumb more than the other. It worked very well. One cuts, the other chooses. So simple. I keep waiting to hear this solution on the SuperNanny television show.

“Of course, you can try it,” she said, as she smoked a very rare cigarette. I was about 5 and thought it looked interesting. It worked. One puff and I’ve never gone anywhere near cigarettes since. Instead of lecturing me on why it was bad and not for kids, she thought the experiment might work better. I don’t think the word “dangerous” came into her decision – who knew back then that it really was dangerous? The tiny puff, horrible taste and ensuing coughing were enough for me for life.

When my mother was born, her parents were both working and my mother was cared for by her maternal grandmother, Little Grandma, in Newark, New Jersey. For five years, she “lived” Yiddish.

When it came time for her to go to school, they tried to register her. Of course, the principal and teachers only spoke English. After some unsuccessful conversations and some talk of this child being mentally-challenged because she couldn’t understand the simplest of English sentences, they decided to try something. They brought in a Yiddish-speaking teacher for a very animated session with the child. The result was that not only wasn’t she mentally-challenged, but that she knew enough to to skip a grade as she already knew how to read and write (albeit in Yiddish).

An excellent student throughout school, she attended Samuel J. Tilden High School in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she received such grades as a 98 in Organic Chemistry – who gets grades like that? She had great hopes of becoming a doctor like her maternal uncle, Dr. Louis (Leib) Tollin. Cornell University accepted her for pre-med.

Unfortunately, times were different back then, and although her mother wanted her to do whatever she wanted, her father, perhaps harking back to his shtetl childhood in Suchastow (Galicia->Poland->Ukraine), refused to allow her to consider that future. I was told he insisted she become a teacher, a respected job for a Jewish girl.

Off she went on the bus and subway into the “city” to Greenwich Village and NYU, instead of to upstate Ithaca. However, throughout her life, she was interested in all things medical, read journals, and everything she could find.

As a child, she had a wonderful singing voice, inherited from her mother, and was the descendant and niece of several hazzanim (cantors). Mom auditioned for the Ted Mack Amateur Hour on the radio – the American Idol of its day – and was selected to perform. Always somewhat shy, her stage fright got the best of her and she just couldn’t sing that day.

My grandparents had already bought a large piece of land in Kauneonga Lake, near White Lake, in the Catskills, which would become the future Kauneonga Park bungalow colony – the family spent summers and holidays there. My mother was an excellent swimmer. The story was that she used to regularly swim across the lake in summer and, in winter, would ice skate across it.

The women in my family were excellent cooks, and my mother continued the tradition. Although raised in a traditional kosher home, that wasn’t part of her persona. So we went to the Italian butcher for the best veal cutlets that would become excellent veal parmigiana, and delicious tender roasts, but also to the Jewish butcher for the best brisket, freshest ground meat and kosher chickens.

A favorite treat was going to the kosher butcher for ground meat. We were little cannibals and loved to eat the fresh ground meat sprinkled with kosher salt. Who knew we were gourmets and were really eating steak tartare?

I’m sure people’s eyes are rolling at this raw meat business, but we never got sick and it was the most delicious gastronomic experience at that time of my life. The butcher would place some beautiful fresh ground meat on a piece of brown butcher paper, sprinkle it with coarse kosher salt and we’d eat it up in a flash. I do remember horrified looks on the faces of customers.

We were never allowed to do this at the Italian butcher. And it could not be ready- ground meat in a tray, it could only be fresh-ground to her order.

That ground meat became the best-ever meat loaf – I still make it – or stuffed peppers or spaghetti sauce. In the summer, when we went to mountains, one of her specialities was Chinese-style spareribs (kosher short ribs from Mendelson’s in the village). Those were superb, but I’ve never made them myself.

The only time I remember a really major culinary screw-up was when she decided to buy a new-fangled blender and tried to make tuna salad in it. What poured out was not tuna salad as this planet knew it. Guess what? When you put enough matzo meal or Italian bread crumbs in the “soup,” you could form patties and fry them up.

Like my grandmother, she was an excellent sewer, knitter and crocheter. In particular, I remember a black silk dress with a ruffled collar, and also a black-and-white tweed winter skirt and jacket. When our daughter was an infant, she created amazing things – an entire trunkful of sweaters, buntings, hats and outfits. Most of it was from Italian-language magazines – she couldn’t read the language but figured out the sophisticated designs from the patterns. When we moved from Los Angeles to Southern Nevada, the entire trunk disappeared and I was heartbroken over the loss.

When my husband and I lived in Teheran, Mom would visit us. It was a long trip in those days, with few non-stop flights from New York. She was never afraid of going off exploring on her own in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. She’d call a taxi, go off to the museums and have a great day.

She believed in taking responsibility, and she generally found a good solution for problems. She was always calm – I wish I had inherited that – and I don’t remember her ever yelling at me – I’m sure she must have, but I just don’t remember it.

Of course, there was that time I was watching cartoons on our tiny television screen and I spilled a glass of milk while sitting on a tiny bench at the leather-topped coffee table. Something happened way back then, I knew she was angry, but it really was an accident … honest.

My mother was the descendant of generations of women and men who lived through the 1391 pogroms in Spain; through the Inquisition; through disasters, epidemics and historic events in Eastern Europe, surmounted the trials of immigration and personal tragedy. They survived and flourished by being “lucky,” which I think was merely another word for wisely utilizing innate intelligence and wit.

We have hopefully inherited some of these traits from our ancestors.

The next question: What will our descendants say about us?

My mother, the genius!

“Of course, you can have a horse,” said my mother. “It just has to sleep under your bed!”

My mother was a genius in more ways than one, although her real talent was in situations like the “horse issue.” When I became horse-mad, as many girls do at some point, I wanted a horse.

Now, where was such a four-footed creature supposed to live in a Brooklyn brownstone? How would it get up the outside stairs or to the second floor bedrooms?Obviously, we hadn’t thought it out carefully. But what was important was that Mom said we could have one. It wasn’t her fault that the horse couldn’t possibly fit under our bed. We even measured it!

It’s a good thing we didn’t know about today’s lofted beds, which would have provided at least a miniature pony-friendly environment.

“Of course, you two can have a piece of cake. One of you cuts it and the other one gets first pick.” We pulled out the rulers and slide rules on that one. If computers had been around then, we’d have found a computer program to calculate the angle of the cut and the volume of the cake. God forbid that the other person should get one crumb more than the other. It worked very well. One cuts, the other chooses. So simple. I keep waiting to hear this solution on the SuperNanny television show.

“Of course, you can try it,” she said, as she smoked a very rare cigarette. I was about 5 and thought it looked interesting. It worked. One puff and I’ve never gone anywhere near cigarettes since. Instead of lecturing me on why it was bad and not for kids, she thought the experiment might work better. I don’t think the word “dangerous” came into her decision – who knew back then that it really was dangerous? The tiny puff, horrible taste and ensuing coughing were enough for me for life.

When my mother was born, her parents were both working and my mother was cared for by her maternal grandmother, Little Grandma, in Newark, New Jersey. For five years, she “lived” Yiddish.

When it came time for her to go to school, they tried to register her. Of course, the principal and teachers only spoke English. After some unsuccessful conversations and some talk of this child being mentally-challenged because she couldn’t understand the simplest of English sentences, they decided to try something. They brought in a Yiddish-speaking teacher for a very animated session with the child. The result was that not only wasn’t she mentally-challenged, but that she knew enough to to skip a grade as she already knew how to read and write (albeit in Yiddish).

An excellent student throughout school, she attended Samuel J. Tilden High School in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she received such grades as a 98 in Organic Chemistry – who gets grades like that? She had great hopes of becoming a doctor like her maternal uncle, Dr. Louis (Leib) Tollin. Cornell University accepted her for pre-med.

Unfortunately, times were different back then, and although her mother wanted her to do whatever she wanted, her father, perhaps harking back to his shtetl childhood in Suchastow (Galicia->Poland->Ukraine), refused to allow her to consider that future. I was told he insisted she become a teacher, a respected job for a Jewish girl.

Off she went on the bus and subway into the “city” to Greenwich Village and NYU, instead of to upstate Ithaca. However, throughout her life, she was interested in all things medical, read journals, and everything she could find.

As a child, she had a wonderful singing voice, inherited from her mother, and was the descendant and niece of several hazzanim (cantors). Mom auditioned for the Ted Mack Amateur Hour on the radio – the American Idol of its day – and was selected to perform. Always somewhat shy, her stage fright got the best of her and she just couldn’t sing that day.

My grandparents had already bought a large piece of land in Kauneonga Lake, near White Lake, in the Catskills, which would become the future Kauneonga Park bungalow colony – the family spent summers and holidays there. My mother was an excellent swimmer. The story was that she used to regularly swim across the lake in summer and, in winter, would ice skate across it.

The women in my family were excellent cooks, and my mother continued the tradition. Although raised in a traditional kosher home, that wasn’t part of her persona. So we went to the Italian butcher for the best veal cutlets that would become excellent veal parmigiana, and delicious tender roasts, but also to the Jewish butcher for the best brisket, freshest ground meat and kosher chickens.

A favorite treat was going to the kosher butcher for ground meat. We were little cannibals and loved to eat the fresh ground meat sprinkled with kosher salt. Who knew we were gourmets and were really eating steak tartare?

I’m sure people’s eyes are rolling at this raw meat business, but we never got sick and it was the most delicious gastronomic experience at that time of my life. The butcher would place some beautiful fresh ground meat on a piece of brown butcher paper, sprinkle it with coarse kosher salt and we’d eat it up in a flash. I do remember horrified looks on the faces of customers.

We were never allowed to do this at the Italian butcher. And it could not be ready- ground meat in a tray, it could only be fresh-ground to her order.

That ground meat became the best-ever meat loaf – I still make it – or stuffed peppers or spaghetti sauce. In the summer, when we went to mountains, one of her specialities was Chinese-style spareribs (kosher short ribs from Mendelson’s in the village). Those were superb, but I’ve never made them myself.

The only time I remember a really major culinary screw-up was when she decided to buy a new-fangled blender and tried to make tuna salad in it. What poured out was not tuna salad as this planet knew it. Guess what? When you put enough matzo meal or Italian bread crumbs in the “soup,” you could form patties and fry them up.

Like my grandmother, she was an excellent sewer, knitter and crocheter. In particular, I remember a black silk dress with a ruffled collar, and also a black-and-white tweed winter skirt and jacket. When our daughter was an infant, she created amazing things – an entire trunkful of sweaters, buntings, hats and outfits. Most of it was from Italian-language magazines – she couldn’t read the language but figured out the sophisticated designs from the patterns. When we moved from Los Angeles to Southern Nevada, the entire trunk disappeared and I was heartbroken over the loss.

When my husband and I lived in Teheran, Mom would visit us. It was a long trip in those days, with few non-stop flights from New York. She was never afraid of going off exploring on her own in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. She’d call a taxi, go off to the museums and have a great day.

She believed in taking responsibility, and she generally found a good solution for problems. She was always calm – I wish I had inherited that – and I don’t remember her ever yelling at me – I’m sure she must have, but I just don’t remember it.

Of course, there was that time I was watching cartoons on our tiny television screen and I spilled a glass of milk while sitting on a tiny bench at the leather-topped coffee table. Something happened way back then, I knew she was angry, but it really was an accident … honest.

My mother was the descendant of generations of women and men who lived through the 1391 pogroms in Spain; through the Inquisition; through disasters, epidemics and historic events in Eastern Europe, surmounted the trials of immigration and personal tragedy. They survived and flourished by being “lucky,” which I think was merely another word for wisely utilizing innate intelligence and wit.

We have hopefully inherited some of these traits from our ancestors.

The next question: What will our descendants say about us?

Carnivals of Genealogy past and future

Jasia at Creative Gene does an excellent job organizing our Carnival of Genealogy. She has just posted the index of COGs past and future through 2009.

This list is most helpful for readers who wish to understand how many geneabloggers address these different topics according to their own experiences, and also to learn what’s coming up in the future.

In the past, each edition has elicited numerous entries. For geneabloggers, it provides an impetus to write on topics which we may not have previously addressed, while our many blog readers get to see varying opinions, origins, events and the styles of many gen writers.

For the click-ons for COGs already posted, view here.

2006

Edition 1 Technology 6/04/2006
Edition 2 Ethnic Genealogy 6/18/2006
Edition 3 Immigration 7/02/2006
Edition 4 Family Reunions 7/17/2006
Edition 5 Historical Fiction 8/03/2006
Edition 6 Genealogical Societies 8/18/2006
Edition 7 Writing a Family History 9/04/2006
Edition 8 Family Photos 9/17/2006
Edition 9 Genealogy Vacations 10/03/2006
Edition 10 Tombstones 10/17/2006
Edition 11 Family Get Togethers 11/05/2006
Edition 12 Solving Technical Problems 11/19/2006
Edition 13 Genealogy Bloopers 12/04/2006
Edition 14 Genealogy Gift Giving 12/17/2006

2007

Edition 15 Genealogy New Year’s Resolutions 1/02/2007
Edition 16 Family Food & Recipes 0/16/2007
Edition 17 Thanks & Acknowledgement 2/04/2007
Edition 18 5 Best Tips for Specific Research Areas 2/18/2007
Edition 19 Family Homes 3/03/2007
Edition 20 A Tribute to Women 3/17/2007
Edition 21 Funny, Foolish, Family! 4/04/2007
Edition 22 Carousel Edition (mixed topic) 4/18/2007
Edition 23 School Days 5/04/2007
Edition 24 Mothers 5/18/2007
Edition 25 Who inherited the creative gene in your family? 6/04/2007
Edition 26 Dads 6/19/2007
Edition 27 What America/Independence Day means to my family 7/03/2007
Edition 28 Surnames 7/18/2007
Edition 29 Moral or legal dilemmas in genealogy or blogging 8/02/2007
Edition 30 Genealogical conferences and seminars 8/18/2007
Edition 31 Proving or debunking family myths 9/04/2007
Edition 32 Family war stories 9/18/2007
Edition 33 Weddings 10/04/2007
Edition 34 Halloween and the supernatural 10/18/2007
Edition 35 A family mystery that might be solved by DNA? 11/04/2007
Edition 36 Carousel Edition (mixed topic) 11/18/2007
Edition 37 Genealogy wish lists 12/03/2007
Edition 38 The New Millennium (2000) 12/18/2007

2008

Edition 39 New Year’s Resolutions 1/04/2008
Edition 40 Living-relative connections 1/18/2008
Edition 41 Dinner with 4 ancestors 2/04/2008
Edition 42 Best of the est, iGene Awards edition 2/18/2008
Edition 43 Technology Tips for Genealogists 3/04/2008
Edition 44 A Tribute to Women 3/18/2008
Edition 45 Cars as Stars of Our Family History 4/04/2008
Edition 46 Inherited Traits 4/18/2008
Edition 47 A Place Called Home 5/04/2008
Edition 48 Mom, How’d You Get So Smart? 5/18/2008
Edition 49 Swim Suit Edition 6/04/2008
Edition 50 Family Pets 6/18/2009
Edition 51 Independent Spirit 7/04/2008
Edition 52 Age 7/18/2008
Edition 53 Carousel Edition 8/04/2008
Edition 54 The Family Language 8/18/2008
Edition 55 Show and Tell 9/04/2008
Edition 56 Essential Books in Your Genealogical Library 9/18/2008
Edition 57 I Read It In The News! 10/05/2008
Edition 58 Fact or Fiction, Haunting Stories 10/18/2008
Edition 59 Politics and Our Ancestors 11/04/2008
Edition 60 Alzheimer’s Disease 11/18/2008
Edition 61 Traditions 12/04/2008
Edition 62 Wishes! 12/18/2009

2009

Edition 63 New Year’s Resolutions 1/04/2009
Edition 64 Winter Photo Essay 1/18/2009
Edition 65 Genealogy Happy Dance 2/04/2009
Edition 66 Second Annual iGene Awards 2/18/2009
Edition 67 Nobody’s Fool 3/04/2009
Edition 68 Women’s History Month: One Woman 3/18/2009
Edition 69 What if: Rewriting History 4/04/2009
Edition 70 Uncle! Uncle! 4/18/2009
Edition 71 Local History 05/04/2009
Edition 72 Honoring Mothers 5/18/2009
Edition 73 The Good Earth: Family Ties to the Land 6/04/2009
Edition 74 Second Annual Swim Suit Edition 6/18/2009
Edition 75 Justice and Independence 7/04/2009
Edition 76 How I Spent My Summer Vacation 7/18/2009
Edition 77 Disasters Our Ancestors Lived Through 8/04/2009
Edition 78 Ride Em Cowboy: Let’s See Your Pony Pictures! 8/18/2009
Edition 79 Family Reunions 9/04/2009
Edition 80 Research An Event Your Ancestor May Have Attended 9/18/2009
Edition 81 Blog Obituary 10/04/2009
Edition 82 Weddings! 10/18/2009
Edition 83 Musical Instruments 11/04/2009
Edition 84 “Harvest”: What it meant to your family 11/18/2009
Edition 85 Orphans and Orphans 12/05/2009
Edition 86 Holiday Theme 12/18/2009

My recent post on Blog Obituaries – If your blog died today… – prompted Jasia to suggest it as the topic for the 81st COG in October 2009.

Happy reading! Thank you, Jasia, for your work!