Follow Friday: My Favorite Blog Posts of the Week

Happy Friday!! It was another great week in the genealogy blogosphere. Here are some posts by some of my fellow family historians that I think you might enjoy. Please click on over and show them some love!

You may not have noticed, but those of us who have our blogs hosted on Google's Blogger site were a bit flummoxed when Blogger went down for over a day late last week. Wonder what some of my fellow bloggers did during the downtime? Read on here, here and here to see what Amy Coffin from The Wee Tree Genealogy Blog, Elizabeth at Little Bytes of Life and Randy Seaver from Genea-Musings did during "The Great Blogger Fail of 2011." Also, Lorine at Olive Tree Genealogy Blog brought us a little reality (and some tips) about backing up our blogs in case of catastrophic technical failure! Guess what I'll be doing in the next couple of weeks...

Lorine from Olive Tree Genealogy also shared with us a Civil War-era family photo album that has come into her possession. Color me jealous!!!

Heather at Leaves For Trees is helping a friend find her Mexican family roots - no easy feat! I've been thinking about doing the same for my brother-in-law's family (so my nephews will have a more well-rounded family history), and I'll be following Heather's quest to get some good tips and tricks.

One of my recently-discovered Beals cousins, Travis at TJLGenes: Preserving Our Family History, shared the 1867 tombstone of his 5th great grandfather, Nathan C. Beals, that he found thanks to the efforts of one of the many volunteers at FindAGrave.com.

Greg A. Hoots was the guest blogger at the Flint Hills of Kansas blog this week, and he wrote a great story about the cowboy history in the Flint Hills. Since I have my own cowboys who hail from the Flint Hills of Kansas and worked cattle there, this was a great read for me. Greg has also written a new book about the Flint Hills. It will be available next week, and I look forward to snapping up a copy!

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings offers a great tip about using the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) website to find your own Revolutionary War patriots. Trust me, he's right. The DAR website, and its GRS research system, were instrumental in helping me locate some great information, including a "Record Copy" of another DAR member's accepted application that helped me to prove my own patriot and join this wonderful organization.

I loved this post from Marian at Climbing My Family Tree. When she writes about her mother-in-law, Marian Jane McClure, who was born in 1909 Cleveland, Ohio, she gives us a rich history of that time and place, including demographics of the city, transportation and exploration during that age. I hope she doesn't mind, but I plan to use her idea for some of my upcoming blog posts. Genealogy is so much more than just names/dates/places, so I appreciate that Marian has gone a step further to truly flesh out her relatives' histories.

Finally, my cousin, Jennifer, over at the "other" Climbing My Family Tree blog, had a great time last week at the National Genealogical Society (NGS) conference in Charleston, SC, with her daughter, Ellie. She kept us up-to-date with all the great stuff she learned and the people she met at the conference (and her AWESOME photography!). My favorite post, however, included this wonderful video "news report" that Ellie produced and starred in! Ellie took us on a tour of the conference and introduced us to some of the big influencers in the genealogy community. She's a great interviewer, and I think Ellie may have a broadcast career in her future!

I hope you'll click over to these great blogs that influence and inspire me each week. You might learn something, and you'll certainly be entertained!