Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Very Best Genealogy Finds in 2023

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1)  Ellen Thompson-Jennings posted an interesting question last week in Best Genealogy Find of 2023.

2)  What was your very best genealogy finds in 2023?  Elusive ancestors?  Hard-to-find records?  Family photographs?  Family stories?  Family artifacts?  New cousins?  What else?

3) Tell us about one or more of them in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook Status  post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

Here's mine:

Elusive ancestor(s):  I found a number of ancestors of my 2nd great-grandparents James and Hannah (Rich) Richman in the Wiltshire church records and added their families to my RootsMagic family tree and my Ancestry Member Tree with source citations.

Hard-to-find records:  I enjoyed mining the four Wiltshire, England, Church of England record collections for my ancestors and relatives in Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812; Marriages and Banns, 1754-1916; Births and Baptisms, 1813-1922; and Deaths and Burials, 1813-1922.  I posted many of these in my Treasure Chest Thursday blog posts.

Family photographs:  While using the MyHeritage Reimagine mobile app on my iPhone to scan and separate photo album pages that have sat in my closet, bookcases and piles for decades, I found many photographs that I did not recall seeing before.  I scanned, enhanced, colorized,  tagged and captioned over 500 photographs and added them to my MyHeritage Photo collection and desktop computer file folders.  Some appeared in my Wordless Wednesday blog posts.

Family stories:  I found the paper copies of the family letters my Seaver aunts and uncle wrote about their family life, then digitized and OCRed them using a Scanner app on my iPhone.  Then I added the pages to a text document, edited the pages one at a time, and saved them to my desktop computer file folders.  Also, I had digital copies of our family Christmas letters from 1992 to 2023, so I made a text document for those and saved it to my file folders.  

Family artifacts:  I found several family artifacts when we emptied the closet in the genealogy cave.  My mother's childhood art portfolio, my father's bowling scrapbook, my grandfather's rental receipts, a beautiful fan from the 1800s, and my own school report cards.

New cousins:  These are mainly from DNA matches.  Several of them made contact with me, and I helped one of them identify his biological parents as a result of the DNA match and his birth mother's surname.  

Those are the Best Genealogy Finds I found (or found again) in 2023!

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