Saturday, April 11, 2020

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- The Games Your Family Played

It's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun! 


Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music here) is to:

1)  Think about the games that your whole family would play when you were a child. 

2)  Tell us about one (or more) of them - what was it called, what were the rules (as you remember them), who played the game, where did you play the game, who usually won?

3)  Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a post on Facebook.

Here's mine:


The game was called GHOST.  It was a word game - the players went around the table spelling English words one letter at a time, with a minimum of four letters.  If you spelled a complete valid word, then you got a letter in the word GHOST.  A person that received 5 letters was out of the game.  The winner of the game was the one with the fewest points at the end of the game (in our house, it was usually when my father wanted to stop to do some work at his desk).  A player could challenge the spelling of the previous player, who had to pronounce and spell the complete word s/he was thinking of.  If they could, then the challenger got the letteroint.  If they couldn't, then the one challenged got the letter. 

We (my family of four) played GHOST almost every night after dinner at the dinner table for several years when I was aged 12 to 15 (and my brother was aged 9 to 12; my youngest brother was born in 1955 when I was 12).  This was a great game to help us with spelling, it was competitive, and it got my brother and me reading the dictionary for hours searching for interesting words.  It also gave us some family time in the late 1950s before we all were addicted to the evening television shows. 

My strategy was to find unique words in the dictionary that I could "hang" on one of the other family members.  for instance, if someone started a new word with "b" and I was second in the round, then I would say "d" and the family had to spell "bdellium," which hung the letter on the 4th person in the round. If they started with "m" then I would say "n" and the word had to be "mnemonic." Heh.

Eventually, we got around to finding and spelling "antidisestablishmentarianism," "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" (I remembered the first parts, but had to look it up!) and other long words, but we had to be careful not to spell a complete word within the longer word - like "antidisestablishment."  We hadn't heard of Mary Poppins and "supercallifragilisticexpialidocious" yet.  We experimented in later years with being able to add two letters in order to avoid spelling a valid word.  I loved to try to get my father to spell the valid word, and he would usually try to bluff his way through.  I tried to avoid getting my mother, but didn't mind getting my brother. 

Challenging had a strategy too - if I knew I was going to get hung with a letter, I would try to bluff everyone by confidently saying a letter and hoping that I wouldn't be challenged.  Of course, this usually broke down into arguments satisfied only by the one challenged looking the word up in the dictionary. 

I searched for the GHOST game and found this Wikipedia entry, which describes the basic game and several variants.



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Copyright (c) 2020, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

Added and Updated Ancestry.com Record Collections - Week of 5 to 11 April 2020

The following record collections were listed on the Ancestry Card Catalog list on Ancestry.com during the period from 5 to 11 April 2020:  

The ADDED and Updated record collections are:

Latvia Births, Marriages and Deaths, 1854-1909; indexed records with record images, ADDED 4/9/2020

New York, Executive Orders for Commutations, Pardons, Restorations, Clemency and Respites, 1845-1931; indexed records with record images, Updated 4/9/2020

New York State, Extradition Requisition and Mandate Registers, 1857-1938; indexed records with record images, ADDED 4/9/2020

New York, Discharges of Convicts, 1882-1915; indexed records with record images, Updated 4/8/2020


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The complete Ancestry.com Card Catalog is at    http://search.ancestry.com/search/CardCatalog.aspx.  

By my count, there were NEW collections ADDED this past week, per the list above.  There are now 32,760 collections available as of 11 April, an increase of  2 from last week.



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Disclosure:  I have a complimentary all-access subscription from Ancestry.com, for which I am thankful.  Ancestry.com has provided material considerations for travel expenses to meetings, and has hosted events and meals that I have attended in Salt Lake City, in past years.


Copyright (c) 2020, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

Added and Updated Record Collections at FamilySearch.org - Week of 5 to 11 April 2020

I am trying to keep up with the new and updated record collections at FamilySearch   (https://familysearch.org/search/collection/list) every week.

As of 11 April 2020, there were 2,763 historical record collections on FamilySearch (an increase of 6 from last week):

The added (in BOLD) or updated collections this week are:

Iowa State Census, 19252,487,917Apr 8, 2020
Minnesota Deaths, 1887-2001522,762Apr 8, 2020
England Death Record,1998-20153,293,133Apr 6, 2020
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Unfortunately, FamilySearch changed their website a bit and Marshall has been unable to do his "magic" this week to determine what is new, updated or removed.

In order to select a specific record collection on FamilySearch, go to  https://familysearch.org/search/collection/list and use the "Filter by collection name" feature in the upper left-hand corner and use keywords (e.g. "church england") to find collections with those keywords.

Each one of the collections listed above has a Research Wiki page (use the "Learn more" link).  It would be very useful if the Wiki page for each collection listed the dates for when the collection was added as a new collection and the dates for major updates also.

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Copyright (c) 2020, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.