Over at my other blog, A Home for the Family Tree, I have been doing a month long writing intensive called the A to Z Challenge. Here is the final post, Y & Z…is for Ypsilanti and Zora, which is a summary of the different posts I wrote for the Challenge.

Well, this is the last post for this year’s A to Z Challenge. Granted, this was supposed to be done last Thursday, but I’m marching to my own drummer on this. I set out to jump start my history/genealogy blog and I feel I have accomplished that goal. This entry will make 20 posts. It is not quite the 26 I intended, but certain posts were definitely longer than the recommended ‘under 500 words’ and so I’m ok with 20.

Here’s a summary of the first 19 posts:

I wrote about how digging through old photos and documents, digitizing, and then processing them is A Reclamation Project in my first post of the challenge. In the second and third posts, I focused on the Baldwin Clan and my Cooper Ancestors, in particular my great-great-grandmother, Annie. I switched directions for my fourth post, and wrote about Our Dog Bleu. My second great grandmother, Emily Grace Adams, was the focus of my fifth entry, while my relatives with the name ‘Frank’ were the focus of the sixth post. After this post, it was the middle of the month and I was already off track, so I started to hop around with the A-Z letter titles. M was for Family History Myths & Mysteries and was my seventh post, while Games we play as a family was the focus of the eighth. The ninth was N…is for Nellie–my mom’s name as well as her grandmother’s and the tenth was H is for Hatton/Hempsall/Hobson, my great-grandmother Nellie’s family. The eleventh post was a summary of the different jobs some of my relatives have had and how none of my ancestors were Kings and Queens. The twelfth post was about how I was named after my grandparents, Joe and Ann and the thirteenth post was dedicated to Ann and her sisters, those Segger Girls. The fourteenth post was about Our Puppies. Posts fifteen, sixteen and seventeen were assorted letters from my great-grandparents Joe and Lucy’s collection and each took care of a number of letters in the alphabet: L & I & P were represented in Lucy’s Letters on the Great Influenza Pandemic, while R & W & V were about the Very Curious Ruth Warner and T was for the Saddler Transport Section. The eighteenth post was an assortment of pictures from the early days UpNorth at the Cottage and the nineteenth was all about my father’s influence on my love of being active in X is for eXercise.

Shwew!!!

But what about Y and Z? Those letters are for what I didn’t get to with this challenge. Specifically, I may have covered a lot of ground in regards to my family, but I didn’t spend any time on my husband’s family. Part of that is because while I have this new collection digitized and I’ve made some great strides in researching his clan on Ancestry, I still have a lot of research to do before I start writing. I need to head to a number of research centers and repositories, including time in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where many of Terry’s family lived during the 1900s, at the Ypsilanti Historical Society. I also want to head to Ontario, Canada where many of his ancestor’s lived during the mid-1800s, including his great-great grandmother Zora Belle Simmons.

So much research to do and I cannot wait to see what kind of discoveries I will find.