News — Stories

Before the pandemic, my town held an annual Memorial Day parade featuring veterans and other community groups. I hope the parade will return next year, but today we can still remember those who served. When I was a kid, I participated in the parade as a scout and remember talking to one of the U.S. Army Air Force vets from World War II in the march. He told me he served on a bomber crew over Europe, and remembered missions where fighter cover was provided by the Tuskegee Airmen - the all-black squadron who escorted bombers over Nazi-held territory.  Their...

One of our favorite programs on TV is Finding Your Roots, the long-running PBS history/genealogy series hosted by Professor Henry Louis Gates. It would be a fascinating program if it were just about genealogy. In our opinion, what really makes it shine are the wonderful interviews with well-known people who go into the interview not knowing what's going to come out about their families' pasts. It may be touching, troubling, funny, or revealing, but are usually a combination of all of these elements. Moreover, the personal stories of long-forgotten ancestors not only connect modern-day interviewees with their family history, but...

I was thinking the other day about how to tell EasyGenie's "origin story," or how we were founded. On this website, I note EasyGenie was started in 2016. That's when we launched our first starter genealogy kit printed on acid-free paper, as a complement to the genealogy guide we had published the previous year (the award-winning Genealogy Basics In 30 Minutes by professional genealogist Shannon Combs-Bennett).  But the more I think about it, the more I realize EasyGenie's origin story goes back much further.  Between 1982 and 1985, my mother had the foresight to make three audio recordings with my late grandfather, a U.S....