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Tag: obituary

Family History News

Posted in Site Issues/Technical, and Updates

Papa and Me
My grandfather and me before my grandmother’s funeral

I don’t update this blog very much, mainly because I don’t have a lot of time to work on family history, but I have some found time today, and I plan to do some updating on the family tree on this site. I continue to enjoy the fact that far-flung cousins find old posts on this site and interact. This blog probably has way more comments than any other site I administer, which speaks to the power of family bringing us all together.

I have been thinking for a while that I should share some updates. A lot has happened over the last six months. We all lost my grandmother Doris Thurman Cunningham last November. I was personally devastated by her loss as we were very close. I wrote her obituary and delivered her eulogy. Perhaps some time I will share the eulogy here. I have struggled with whether or not to make her family tree page public since she has passed, but ultimately, I don’t think I am ready yet. If you are a family member and create a login, however, it is accessible.

We lost my father’s brother, my Uncle David “Buck” Swier, Jr. last week. Here is his obituary. I am thinking a great deal of my Aunt Sandy and cousins Misty, Krista, and Nicole, as well as their children. I was not close to Buck and hadn’t seen him in many years, but he and my dad spoke via Skype, and my dad enjoyed these conversations.

I had to move web hosts since the last time I updated. I had a truly awful experience with my former host, Bluehost. They basically shut down my site because they alleged it was not optimized and was slowing other sites on the same server down. They offered to fix the issue for several hundred dollars. I was a customer of theirs for over ten years, and I don’t feel I was treated fairly. I moved to DreamHost, and I have been very happy with them. Much less down time for my sites, and no issues at all so far. In the process of migrating, I had to fix a few issues, but it’s entirely possible that some photographs didn’t link up properly, so if you find broken links or images, I apologize. It will likely be summer before I have the kind of time I would need to fix those issues.

As always, I invite family members to connect, and I love to read comments from people who find the research here useful. The family tree on this site is a slow work in progress, but if you find information you wish to contribute, please let me know.

Reunion for Mac

Posted in Genealogy 101

I downloaded Reunion for Mac, and I have been trying it out this afternoon.  It felt sad to put in the death details for my grandfather’s sister Eva Marie Gearhart Heier:

Eva M. Heier

Eva M. Heier, 93, of Yakima died Sunday.

Mrs. Heier was born in Spokane and lived in Yakima later in life. She had many occupations, including working as a clerk for the post office.

Survivors include a son, David Bunce of Yakima; and a sister, Marjorie Waters of Menan, Idaho.

No services are planned at this time.

Keith and Keith Funeral Home is in charge of the arrangements.

From Yakima Herald-Republic, Aug. 30, 2007

We did not know she had died until about October or November of last year, when my mother asked me if I knew anything.  I looked up her obituary on Ancestry.com.  I sent her a letter, and now that I’m thinking about it, I may even have sent it after she died.  I wanted to find out what she could tell me about her family, which has such a tragic story.  I’m not sure who to ask at this point.  Our family was in touch with Aunt Eva, but I’m not sure whether I can still locate Aunt Marjorie Waters mentioned in the obituary as living in Idaho.

Reunion has an iPhone app, and I decided this application would be a great tool for genealogists who are using Reunion.  I love my iPhone and already use a lot of the other helpful apps available, and I can see that this particular app will be valuable when my computer isn’t handy to look up information or to input information.

I would like to do some family research this summer.  I haven’t had much time to work on the family research in some time, and it’s something I miss, particularly after exchanging some nice e-mails with a newly found cousin today.

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