I also plan on posting research methods that have worked well for me, so maybe someone out there will find either that or the data useful.  You can check it out here.

I will, however, keep updating this site with new genealogy pages I do and genealogical trips I go on.

I was able to get her siblings’ previously unknown names and birthdates from the History of Jerusalem Lutheran and Reformed Church of Western Salisbury.  I must say, I have now found more than one genealogical treasure from Google Books and will definitely be using it often in my research!

I have found other Breys that were living in Northampton County (now Lehigh) and really want to do a site on the history of German immigrants in Pennsylvania… or maybe een a site where I can post ancestral data I find that may or may not be related to my family, but that I still want to have a record of… but if I’m going to do that it will have to be separate from this and from my genealogy wiki because it really doesn’t fit in either.

What’s so tricky about these two is that there are so many variations on the spellings of their last names.  Elizabeth’s has been spelled Bry, Brey, Bray, and even Brier and Jacob’s has been spelled Beal, Beals, Beels, and Biehl.

So far I have her page up on my Beals/Hall genealogy wiki and have posted the info that I already had, now I’m going to see if I can find more… to start with, I’m doing a small page on Elizabeth’s birthplace (and the home of many of my ancestors),  Lehigh County, PA to get a better picture of the history and land and to serve as a placeholder for my favorite Lehigh links to refer to later.

I did manage to get a nice amount of information from Mouser Ancestry, and you can even read a wonderful biography on their site.  And I managed to get a few census records and a bit about he and his wife from a book on Ancestry.com… but that’s not enough – I want parents’ info!

So far I’ve scoured Google books and Google newspaper archives but have found next to nothing… so if YOU have any ideas, please leave a comment here!

What we do know is that Jacob Beals was married to Elizabeth Bry (or Brye, Brey, or Bray) and was born in Berks County, Pennsylvania on April 15, 1806 and died October 20, 1890 and that he was “of German descent.”

James Francis Beals

I’m still working mainly on my dad’s side of the family and have spent the past couple of days putting James Francis Beals‘s page together and it would truly be ‘but a mere shadow of its former self’ (a phrase my dad used to use often) if it weren’t for the vast amount of information on James F. Beals that Mouser Ancestry has gathered and allowed me to use in my tree.

So while my husband’s ancestors were medicine men and Cherokee outlaws, mine were vanilla German farmers in Pennsylvania - well, vanilla as far as I know, there still could be stories out there to uncover and mysteries to reveal.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember meeting them, but I am glad someone had the forethought to save all of these  obituaries.  Too bad I don’t have any pictures for them…

The information for this page has come from a combination of photos and clippings from my dad’s drawer and research and pictures from my second cousin over at Mouser Ancestry, who has an amazing online family tree!  That’s the way to make a family tree, and that’s what I’m modeling mine after.

So last night I got my dad’s first wife’s (Theora Frances Alexander) page up, thanks to my sisters who provided the information and photos.

And I also got my dad’s mom Oral Grethel Latshaw going and got his grandparents on his mother’s side up (Lewis Edward Latshaw and Nettie Frances Hoffman) but I’m hoping to find pictures and more information on them.   I never got to know my dad’s parents very well, so it’s nice to hear the stories I’ve gotten and to see some photos.  I find it fascinating that my grandmother was an artist who always had oil paints out and that my grandfather was gruff yet extremely generous to the poor and needy.

This part’s the easy part, however, I know further down the line I’m going to have to do a lot more investigating; but I’m also looking forward to that as well… mysteries to unravel

I’m steadily working down my direct line first, and have got the pages for my parents, Larry and Carol Beals, updated as well as the page for Larry’s dad James Loy Beals.

Now that both of my parents have passed away, I’ve been spending a lot of time at their house going through pictures and newspaper clippings so that I can salvage and preserve as much as possible before the upcoming estate sale, and I hope to scan all or most of it eventually for the site.

I’m also still using Ancestry.com for research because they provide a wealth of information as far as census records, Social Security Death indexes, military records, etc. go.

After I couldn’t find any WordPress genealogy plugins, I started blogging about a line of my family tree in a separate family tree blog that I created.  Then, after only three generations took several painstaking hours of my time to write out, I decided that blogging may not be the way to go for publishing a family tree.

So I searched for genealogy publishing programs and found that they were all for publishing on other sites.  No, that’s not what I want.  I’m doing hours upon hours of research, I’m visiting people for interviews about my past, going through family photos and scanning a photoshopping them, and I don’t want to do all of that only to post it on a site that does not belong to me.

Then I realized that I could save my information in Family Tree Maker, then (hopefully!) save the GEDCOM file, then publish that with a GEDCOM to HTML program (I’m still looking into which one I like best).

Now, I just have to wait for my Family Tree Maker to arrive in the mail…