I thought I would do something nice for some cousins this weekend. As some of the Azorean church records are online, I thought I would look through them and find some of my great and great great aunts and uncles. I was able to locate Francisco de Boa Ventura in Sao Jose, Ponta Delgada fairly…
What a whirlwind month for genealogy!
April was one of my best research months in a long time. I’ve made some really neat discoveries on my Portuguese and French lines (where are you, Irish? C’mon, step up!) Let’s see… I found that the town of Ogeu les bains, France has Google street view. I spent a few hours looking around town. …
What do you do when you can’t read the writing?
I am working in records in different village records on Sao Miguel Island, Azores. This means I must read the Portuguese language records. Did I tell you that I don’t know any Portuguese beyond swear words? Well, I have learned some since starting my family tree. I can translate a baptismal record like nobody’s business. …
This may be why I can’t find the marriage
This weekend I decided to redo the work another researcher did for me on Francisco de Medeiros and Josefa de Mello. The town of Maia isn’t on the Azores Archives website yet, so I thought Povoacao was as good as any place to research. I found their son, Joao de Mello’s, baptismal record first. Then,…
That’s Old News: What the heck was Mother’s Friend?
We often look back a hundred or two hundred years ago and think of it as the “simple life”. Hard work and none of the problems of modern life. But, was it really that way or did they just have different problems? I found this ad in a January 1906 issue of the San Francisco…