Follow Friday: a tree grows…in the basement

For this, my first Follow Friday, I offer a post, a blog, and a site for the delight and education of my fellow geneabloggers.

POST OF NOTE:

For Memory Monday, Greta Koehl of Greta’s Genealogy Bog, with her usual lovely and compelling prose, tells a charming tale of an interloping black walnut shoot growing in the basement of her house, whose sheer determination to survive compelled her family to care for it and adopt it as the unofficial mascot of their basement.  An all-around delightful read.

BLOG OF NOTE:

Katrina McQuarrie, a self-described “Gen-Y genealogist” and the blogger behind Kick-Ass Genealogy, has a mission: to help YOU make YOUR family history and genealogical projects as kick-ass as possible, one info-packed how-to post at a time.  Katrina’s got a knack for taking old topics and making them brandy-new and exciting again.  Check out her suggestions for “batching” genealogy tasks for greater productivity.  Also, she’s working her way through a degree in medieval studies (as yours truly did), and that makes her automatically awesome.

SITE OF NOTE:

Scotland’s People has been a favorite site of mine for several years.  Using a “pay per view” fee schedule, genealogists can download a vast amount of Scottish statutory and old parish registers as well as census records and some wills.  This site was instrumental in helping me sort out my Miller/Hislop lines.  However, several of my Irish lines (McCabe, Kelly) also spent years working, marrying and raising their families in Scotland.  As they were Catholic, I couldn’t find them in the old Scottish parish registers.  I had come to accept this.  Imagine my surprise when I logged on to the site in October of this past year and discovered they had added birth and baptism records from the Catholic parish registers of Scotland!  According to the site, this is the first of several installments the site will add over the next few years, encompassing many thousands more Catholic parish records.  The Catholic births and baptisms have already helped me to break through a brick wall I thought would stand until the end of time.  Well done, Scotland’s People.  Thank you!