Proudly powered by WordPress.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Designed & built by Avenue Design Studios.
The final profile in my 2x great-grandmother series is Caroline Ritter (1852-1906) Caroline is the paternal grandmother of my paternal grandfather, James Vincent Pryor. I didn’t learn her name for several years of my family tree research, after I stumbled upon a 4th cousin who filled me in on the Pryor history. The Backstory To […]
Welcome to the next installment of My Family Story focusing on my 2x great-grandmothers. This is the story of Caroline Feil Bliss (1858-1936) who is my maternal grandmother’s mother’s mother. Caroline was born in New Baltimore, Somerset County in 1858. The story of Grandma Caroline is itself quite a tale, as is the story of finding […]
Monday is #LGBTQFamilies Day on social media, sponsored by the blog Mombian and the Family Equality Council since 2006. This day celebrates LGBTQ families. Once again, I’ve decided to share #AMPLIFY posts highlighting the voices of parents, step-parents and grandparents and other caretakers of children. If you are a LGBTQ person with ties to Western Pennsylvania, please […]
This week, I learned that my Uncle Ron (Carl Ronald Keck) died over the weekend. He was 85 years old. I always liked my Uncle Ron. I thought he was funny even when he was using humor to hide some uncharitable thoughts. I thought he was fond of us (my brother and I) because he […]
Content Note: slavery, white privilege, sexism One of the few family history things that I knew growing up was that my great-grandmother, Harriet Hackney, was from rural Tennessee. She died before I was born so I didn’t know her personally, just through stories that my mother shared with me about her ‘Nana.’ The general impression […]
Growing up in a working class Pittsburgh suburb, I knew two things to be true about my family – we were Roman Catholic and we were Irish (with a little German.) We were Irish Catholics and celebrated St. Patrick’s Day robustly. St. Patrick’s Day is also my younger brother’s birthday. Robustly meant lots of green […]
One thing that always amazes me about Olympic athletes, especially the young ones, is their confidence. They might nervous or anxious, but they have demonstrated to themselves that they *can* do this thing, this feat of physical strength and grace. They know they are among the very best for a reason – they earned it. […]
For most of my childhood and young adulthood, my paternal grandmother baked these puddings for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She made one per household for her three adult children, one for her own household, and one for the family meal. She may have baked more on occasion as a gift for a friend or hairdresser or […]
This is a nightmare scenario for me. I am not being histrionic, or perhaps I am being consistent with the histrionic level I’ve been maintaining on domestic partner benefits since 2014. The US Supreme Court has let stand a Texas Supreme Court ruling that there is no established right to spousal benefits in same-sex marriages. […]
One of the sweetest moments in my family tree exploration was the discovery of a very simple item – a letter to Santa published in the Pittsburgh Press on 18 December 1896. The author was a 6-year-old girl named Jennie Rice. She lived at 70 Poplar Alley in the Lower Hill District. Jennie was either […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.