Looking forward to Conference.

Today I gave a lecture on Ancestry Library edition and Ancestry for Individual users. Remember Ancestry is a tool for research and not a place to store your family history collection. A good audience came to the Portage, Wisc. City Library. Third time I have been asked to speak to these experienced genealogy researchers in the last couple years.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

This past Saturday, May 11 the Dane County Area Genealogical Society had an awesome presentation by Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author and poet called “Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones”.

Her book of poetry and genealogy,
‘Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones’, chronicles the genealogical research Hoffman and her mother conducted in 2008, which included visits to some of her ancestors’ homes and many of their graves.

Cynthia is the author of the three poetry collections -Sightseer, Paper Doll Fetus, and Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, as well as the chapbook Her Human Costume.

Hoffman is the recipient of a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Director’s Guest fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy. She has taught creative writing and composition at George Mason University, the University of Wisconsin, and Edgewood.

I was referred to Cynthia by a client I did work for in Madison, WI. An example of how genealogy can bring people together and build a community, which we are all part of in history.

www.cynthiamariehoffman.com

My most recent Guest Blog article is now available: Thanks Katherine Schober for the opportunity to submit.

https://sktranslations.com/finding-german-ancestors-chicago-guest-post-bob-rettammel-rettammel-genealogy