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Sabrina Riley
May 235 min read
Remembering Eldon Laverne Morris
Man with a monkey…Barracks…Japan? The words are fuzzy. The memory is vague. I am not even sure how old I was at the time. Uncle Eldon...
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Sabrina Riley
Mar 23 min read
Great-Grandma's Handwriting
Privately-owned community business colleges were the for-profit educational institutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth...
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Sabrina Riley
Jan 195 min read
The Grand Old Dames of Bristol High School Class of 1938
Dora Belle Keller and my grandmother, Lois Eleanor Morris, were not exactly friends at Bristol High School in Indiana. After graduation...
107 views0 comments
Sabrina Riley
Aug 15, 20223 min read
Family Heritage Adventures in American History
I love to discover new ways to integrate family history with my sons' homeschool history lessons. The first time this happened naturally...
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Sabrina Riley
Jan 18, 20225 min read
The Best Grandma Ever
My sister, Erin, said it best. We stood on her front porch watching fireworks on New Year’s Eve after learning that Grandma Lois had just...
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Sabrina Riley
Jul 22, 20215 min read
A Colorful Life
Ruth Bates Harris may be one of the most significant people of which you have never heard. I discovered her story as I researched a story...
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Sabrina Riley
Mar 29, 20213 min read
Holding Hands With the Past
As I write, I'm preparing to teach a class about World War II to a group of homeschooled third through fifth graders. Using picture...
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Sabrina Riley
Jan 28, 20214 min read
Little House on the Prairie as Family History
Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved Little House on the Prairie series is an amalgamation of memory, fact, and fiction. As recorded in Little...
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Sabrina Riley
Aug 2, 20205 min read
Making a Genealogical End Run
Brick walls. Every genealogist runs into one sooner or later. The dead-end of a trail of evidence with no obvious solution in sight. When...
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Sabrina Riley
Mar 2, 20204 min read
Great-Grandpa's Vaudeville Days
As I was growing up, I frequently heard about my great-grandfather William "Bill" Morris's days as a vaudeville stagehand in Muskegon,...
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Sabrina Riley
Aug 12, 20187 min read
Storing Your Family Treasures for Preservation
Over the past several weeks on Facebook I have been chronicling my progress in organizing my grandparents' collection of family...
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Sabrina Riley
Jun 13, 20184 min read
Lessons From My Grandfathers
"Matriarchs" established that the women in our family are the storytellers. That doesn't mean the men have taught us any less. Their...
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Sabrina Riley
May 11, 20183 min read
Matriarchs
What makes one family a clan and another family a loosely connected network of households–if they even know each other? Is it simply a...
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Sabrina Riley
Mar 21, 20186 min read
Mystery of the Missing Native American DNA Part II
It was Wayne Winkler's observation about the fluidity of Melungeon race identity in the United States Federal censuses that prompted me...
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Sabrina Riley
Nov 19, 20175 min read
David Stevenson's Civil War
Fort Foote occupied what felt like a remote place four miles south of Alexandria and eight miles south of Washington, D.C. With no access...
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Sabrina Riley
Aug 27, 201710 min read
The Stories Your Grandparents Don't Talk About
We all have them. The stories at which our grandparents only hint and won't satisfy us with answers, usually because they are too painful...
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Sabrina Riley
May 16, 20177 min read
Deep Diving in Church Archives
One of the most important reasons for researching family history is to create a deeper emotional connection to family by better...
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Sabrina Riley
Mar 19, 20175 min read
A Case of Patronymics and Variations
This blog post is for my mother who has been suffering a twinge of inferiority complex since the discovery of my father's illustrious...
271 views0 comments
Sabrina Riley
Sep 18, 20163 min read
DNA: A Corrective Tool
Since I last posted about my own DNA results, a number of my family members have participated in our family DNA project. The results are...
61 views0 comments
Sabrina Riley
Jun 11, 20168 min read
Mystery of the Missing Native American DNA Part I
The deeper I dig into DNA genealogical study the more convinced I become that race is an artificial construct of the human imagination,...
1,959 views7 comments
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