Mel's Fantastical Insights

One of the things we all hope to find as genealogists is personal histories. Wouldn't it be fantastic if everyone could have written even a paragraph about themselves and it aaas preserved and findable? Unfortunately this is not the case. This is actually the reason I began looking into my ancestors about a year ago. I was determined after getting a BA in research aka history, that I could find more information than what we currently had available. I was right in my impulse. Our greatest source has been the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. They have been collecting histories on the pioneers for a very long time, and luckily I have a lot of pioneer ancestors. My first stop at their archives revealed a lot of treasures but one of my favorites has been the personal history written by Mariah Taysom. Mariah Jaynes lived on the border of Wales and England in the Monmouth area. She met a Mormon missionary by the name of Charles Taysom and became converted to the Church of Jesu...

Yesterday's blog prompt on women's family history is to tell if you are named for some ancestor in your family. You can tell how awesome I am at keeping up with these. I am not named for an ancestor, but my daughter is. Ask my son and he will tell you the story of his name, how there are many many Daniel's and Daniels on our family tree. He had me print out a family tree so he could circle them all. While he was doing that he ran to his sister and showed her all the Alice's that he could find. In my 8 generations there are about 5. Obviously that's give or take since I am not going to count sisters, daughters that I am unaware of, etc. But Alice is definitely a family name. Alice was destined to be Ruby. I met Ruby and David Haight at a missionary homecoming in Burley, ID many years ago. Since I met them I have loved the name Ruby. While Alice was being bathed and monitored my husband decided that Ruby should not be her name, we decided on Alice. Danie...

March is such a great time. One of the things I have found in my many "Pinteresting" moments was a blog that had a bunch of writing prompts on female ancestors during the Month of March which is Women's History Month. Woohoo! So I am already behind, always, but I will answer a few of the prompts since I find them interesting. For March 1st, the prompt was do you have a favorite female ancestor? I have always had a hard time narrowing down my favorite of anything. I can't ever decide on a favorite song, or hymn or artist or author. I love so many things! It is obviously impossible for me to pick my favorite female ancestor but I will restrain myself and choose just a few to reminisce about. First of all one of my favorites is Mary Humphries/Humphris/Humphreys. I have already blogged about her but she has always been an inspiration to me after knowing that her family traveled in the Willie Handcart Company. Mary came from England, settled in Pleasant View,...

It being Pioneer Day I figured I might as well share with my viewers (all 2 of you) the real reason I don't blog much anymore. It is family history. I spend so much of my very limited computer time researching dead and forgotten ancestors that I have let it take up almost all of my spare time. A lot of my spare time has also been traveling around Utah to meet with cousins, very distant cousins, grandparents, cemeteries and libraries and old pioneer places trying to track down as much info as I can. My children are tired of our family history trips but they still manage to drudge along with me. I figure they will look back and laugh about it one day. Pioneer Day makes me think of all my wonderful pioneer ancestors. My favorite pioneers are my Great great grandfather Amos Maycock and his wife Mary Huphris (Humphreys, Humphries, Humphrys, or any other way you can think to spell it). So here is a shortened story of their journeys. Amos started his journey in England. He was ...