Morgart – Helping History Come Alive

5) Make Some Headway with my Family Tree

This past year I have met a distant cousin because of this blog and our goal is to try to find out more about our shared 6th-great-grandfather, Philip Morgart. We know he is the father to Peter, but who are his other children? Who are his parents? We want to know!

And let us not forget Andrew Blair and Suzanna Akers – they are always in my thoughts and maybe this will be the year that I chip away at that brick wall (I can only hope).

4) Clean Up my Software

I am not always as good about entering my supporting information into my Legacy Family Tree software so I’m going to try to do better about filling in the missing pieces of information for all the many people in my family tree. Some may say why? But I work so hard to have an accurate tree, and if I don’t have the sources connected to my ancestors, then it could look like I’ve just plopped information into my program and not truly done the research.

3) Create a Locality Guide for Bedford County, Pennsylvania

With so many of my ancestors being in the vicinity of Bedford County, Pennsylvania, I’m going to work on creating a locality guide for this area of the world. For all I know one could already exist out there – if it does I really haven’t seen one, so this would be a helpful tool for me in my continued research.

2) Finish my NGS “Family Foundations” Course

I’ve done the first 2 sessions of the “Family Foundations” course offered by the National Genealogical Society. You have 6 months to go through a variety of modules that educate you in all types of topics related to doing your family tree. FamilySearch, Newspapers, Cemeteries, Vital Records, Research Plans, these are just some of the topics you learn about in the first 2 sessions. I still have part 3 to take covering Probate Records, DNA, Religious Records, and more! I really have learned a great deal taking these courses. They do have a cost (reduced for members) but it’s been well worth it.

1) Do a Better Job of Posting Here

I miss making discoveries that I can share here. Not only do I enjoy sharing what I find – but I have discovered a handful of cousins this way (not realizing when I began this that many people use a blog to do just that, not me – I just wanted what I learn to be out there and possibly help others). So I am going to once again focus on my family history and try to go back to introducing not only stories about my family but new techniques and websites as I did in the past because quite frankly, it helped me to learn, too!

Here is wishing you all a wonderful and Happy New Year! May you achieve all of your own goals this upcoming year!

I often watch webinars and videos, read blogs, or attend lectures and Linkpendium is always brought up as being a great resource for genealogists. But I have never used it, so today I am going to change that as we both can learn about Linkpendium together.

Linkpendium.com

When you go to www.linkpendium.com you are greeted with the above homepage, and I like how it begins by telling you what it is and how to use it.

Linkpendium is a directory of over 10-million resources to help you find surnames within the United States (but it does say “worldwide” as well). There are 3-ways for you to research your family:

Using the “Family Discoverer” boxes at the top of the page
- You can select if you want to search “worldwide” or by a specific state.
Using the “Jump to a City” box in the yellow section at the right of the page
Using the “Jump to a County” box below the City in the yellow section
Using the “Jump to a Surname” box in the yellow section

Family Discoverer

So I decided to do a search. I am missing the 1930 Census for my grandfather, Leroy Blair, so I put his first and last name in the Family Discoverer at the top of the page and selected “Pennsylvania” for my area (he lived in 3 different states – Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana). Below are my results for Pennsylvania.

For 85 milliseconds I was impressed. None of the hits initially are of my Leroy Blair but I will take a peek at the MyHeritage link at the top of the page.

I repeated the same search using Indiana and Ohio.

Okay, so I didn’t find out what I was looking for in my quest for information about my grandfather but let’s see what else I am able to find using the various search bars on Linkpendium.

Jump to City

My maternal great-grandmother was born in Coudersport, Pennsylvania so put it into the “Jump to City” search, and received 525 links to pages and subpages for Potter County (Coudersport is the county seat) so all in all I’m pleased (and plan on perusing the pages to get a better idea of the area. I’m especially curious of a biography page that came up, maybe one of my ancestors will be listed).

Jump to Surname

Next I did a surname search using my grandmother’s maiden name “Morgart”. The first half of the page was focused entirely on what I typed, but the second half of the page went into other options of the name. This isn’t so bad as there are a couple of different ways my Morgart’s spelled their last name. The family cemetery is actually known as the Morgart Morgret Cemetery so I could see how alternative spellings could be handy, and give you another option to look for when doing other searches for your family name in Censuses, etc.

I’m definitely going to utilize Linkpendium for future searches. I was impressed with the amount of hits I was able to get on learning about the specific areas of where my ancestors lived, and one of my favorite aspects of doing my family tree is finding out how my relatives spent their time and actually lived their lives. I could see myself being able to find so much more information using this valuable directory.

Has Linkpendium helped you solve any family history mysteries? Let me know in the comments below!

Tag: Morgart

My 5 Genealogical Goals for 2024