Welcome to my first blog post

Welcome to Karen's Genealogy Oasis blog.  I have been thinking about blogs since I attended the Blog Panel at the 2010 SCGS Jamboree in Burbank.  It’s taken me a year to get up the courage to start.  I would really like to thank Amy Coffin of WeTree blog for her encouragement and guidance during the 2011 Jamboree.

I have always loved mysteries and my family history is really a mystery. Unfortunately the solution will not be revealed by page 423 or even page 1051.  I have a gggrandfather who was supposedly bushwacked.  I have ggrandfather who didn't seem to marry, even though he had two wives.  And he didn't seem to die (at least no death records have been found) but I do have lengthy obituaries that were published in 1915 in two different states. 

I have numerous goals for this blog.  (Of course, these may change as I continue my detective work.)

1)   I want to share family information including photographs and other documents.  I have small books and booklets which have biographies and photographs of residents of some Indiana, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas towns.  Very few of these entries are my ancestors.  Perhaps they will help others.

2)   I hope this blog will help cousins in their detective work as well as encourage them to contact me and share their discoveries. Two, three, or many, heads have to be better than one.

3)   I would like to share techniques, web sites, books, and any other thing that I find that may help other researchers.  I appreciate learning techniques that other genealogists/family historians have used to discover ancestors.  And I have a lot of discovery to do. In fact my “brick walls” begin at generation 3.  Yes, that soon! 

4)   I plan to use this blog as a tool to organize my thoughts and plan for further searches.  This will essentially be talking to myself.  I just wish that when I ask questions I could be guaranteed good answers.

5)   I hope that writing this blog will help me become more organized and guide me with the other writing that I know must be started.   After all, my descendants deserve more than miscellaneous folders, notebooks and stacks of papers.

6)   And lastly, I will try to keep readers updated on conferences, seminars and other activities, particularly in Arizona, that may help them with their research and encourage them to meet with other genealogists.

So, I hope you will join me in the Genealogy Oasis and that you will visit often.  Together we can work on finding clues that may lead us to solving at least some of these amazing mysteries.