They say you can never go home again, but I think they’ve got it backward. The truth is, sometimes you’re already home—you just haven’t realized how deep your roots go. I grew up in North St. Louis and spent my years hanging out in Florissant. I knew the parks, the intersections, and the local spots.Read the Post
The Danger of the “Single Document” Trap In genealogy, there is a dangerous temptation to find one official-looking record and declare the case closed. If I had stopped at Oscar’s Missouri Death Certificates, I would have gone to my grave believing he was born in January 1886. If I had settled for his military records,Read the Post
The Burden of the Unwritten We live in an age of certificates, plastic cards, and digital footprints. We are tracked from the second we draw our first breath. But for my great-grandfather, Oscar F. Burgdorf, the world was a much more silent place. Born in March 1889 in the rural stretch of Red Bud, Illinois,Read the Post
If you dig deep enough into the Missouri clay, you eventually stop finding roots and start finding ghosts. My search for Oscar Burgdorf didn’t hit solid ground; it hit a series of trapdoors, each one labeled with a different birth year. It was a journey through the “official” lies of a man who seemed toRead the Post
When we begin the journey of tracing our ancestors, we often expect to find a straight line of names and dates. But as I’ve learned, genealogy is more like sifting through soil; you have to shake away the layers of confusion and conflicting records to find the solid stones of truth. In our family, thatRead the Post
