52 Ancestors

52 Ancestors: St. Paul’s Chapel, Atlas, PA

Posted on June 5, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

  When I saw that “Going to the Chapel” was this week’s theme, I searched all my records for references to the word ‘Chapel’. I found only one occurrence and that was to St. Paul’s Chapel in Atlas, Northumberland Co., Pennsylvania. Atlas is a small village on the outskirts of the city of Mount Carmel, where both my grandmother, Anna […]

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52 Ancestors: Finding My Dad in WWII

Posted on May 23, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

My dad, William Condy Furlani, served in the US Army during World War II. After his death in 1989, I did not discover any military records among his belongings. I first found his enlistment record on Ancestry. He enlisted on 20 December 1943. This record provided me his service number, which I needed to send for his service records. Several […]

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52 Ancestors: My Multi-Lingual Heritage

Posted on May 15, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

  There were many other languages in my family. I’ll start with me. I sang in Latin in the church choir for many years in my youth. This was when the Catholic church still used Latin extensively. I also took two years of Latin in high school, roughly translating the Aeneid so that I could read it the original. This. […]

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52 Ancestors: A Mother’s Day Remembrance

Posted on May 10, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

This photo has a story. My mother, Marguerite Noble Furlani, was born 21 May 1918 in Ranshaw, Coal Township, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. She died of emphysema 25 May 1985 (4 days after her 67th birthday) in Prospect Park, Delaware County, Pennsylvania. In 1985, Mother’s Day fell on the 12th of May. While cleaning out her belongings I found a black […]

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52 Ancestors: Closer to Home

Posted on May 6, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

If you return me To my home port I will kiss you Mother earth Take me back now, take me back now To the port. Of my birth “I’m Your Captain/Closer to Home” written by Mark Farner and performed by Grand Funk Railroad 1970 I struggled with this week’s theme of “Close Up”. I received several good suggestions from my […]

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52 Ancestors: My Introduction to Cemetery Research

Posted on April 26, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

  When I began researching my family in the late 1990s, anyone who might have had any knowledge of our family was deceased. I was the eldest left (except for my mother’s youngest sister, but she had no information. I knew the given and surnames of my parents with their birth dates, and the names of my grandparents and their […]

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52 Ancestors: Weathering the Storms of 1979

Posted on April 17, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

Why did my car end up buried in the snow? Read on to find out. I had always wanted to see a solar eclipse at totality, live and in person, but the Mid-Atlantic weather conditions tended to make this unlikely. After some persuasion, I talked several friends from work into making a trip with me to Winnipeg, Canada, listed as […]

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52 Ancestors: Do You Use Tax Records in Your Research?

Posted on April 13, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

In 2009, I had some research in tax records completed at the Pennsylvania State Archives by eminent genealogist, John T. Humphrey, CG (decd.). My ultimate goal was to identify the father of my 3rd great grandfather, Peter Strausser. I first found Peter, with his wife and family in the 1860 US census living in Coal Twp., Northumberland Co., Pennsylvania. I […]

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52 Ancestors: Before Her Time – A Woman of the 21st Century

Posted on April 6, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

For this week’s theme, I just had to highlight one of my favorite aunts and the only maiden aunt I could find, Dorothy [Dot] A. Furlani, who was born on 15 October 1913 in Connersville, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of Candido (Condy) Furlani and Anna Bianchi. One of three children, she had an older brother, William, my […]

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52 Ancestors: So Many Homesteads

Posted on April 5, 2018 in 52 Ancestors, 52Ancestors

Thinking about this week’s theme, ‘The Old Homestead’, I realized that I have not found many of the old homesteads of my ancestors, and for the ones that I’ve found, I have very little information. Not enough to really focus on one homestead for this post. I decided, instead, to highlight each of the homesteads I have identified. The first […]

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