The Polish History and Culture Challenge

October is Polish-American Heritage Month!  In honor of this national celebration, What’s Past is Prologue is hosting the Polish History and Culture Challenge.  If you have Polish ancestry, it’s a great time to learn more about those ancestors and their lives.  But, even if you do not have any Polish blood, I invite you to [...]

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I read it in the news?

This week’s 57th Carnival of Genealogy proves to be an interesting one.  That is, if you actually have any ancestors that made the news!  The “Call for Submissions” says: Newspapers can be a wonderful source of family history information. I can find nary an obit much less a fascinating news story.  Not yet, anyway…I’m [...]

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Distracted By Books

The illustrious footnoteMaven has presented a distraction-challenge!  As you can tell by my recent lack of posts, I need no help whatsoever in getting distracted, especially if the distraction involves books.  This challenge was to write your life story from the spines of the books in your collection.  For many this would be hard, but [...]

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Getting to Know Me, Getting to Know All About “What’s Past is Prologue”

Terry Thornton of Hill Country of Monroe County as challenged other bloggers to write a post as an introduction to new readers describing who we are, what our blog is about, and what our writing goals are, as well as choosing three examples of our brightest, breeziest, and most beautiful posts.  This one’s for you, [...]

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The Challenges of Researching Irish Ancestry

The Carnival of Irish Heritage and Culture is always a challenge for me; I don’t have any Irish ancestry!  But sometimes I just can’t resist the challenge.  Besides, genealogical skills and research techniques can be used in researching any ethnic background, right?  Well, in trying to do my Carnival homework, that is, to work back [...]

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Call Me Ishmael

Trendy names are all the rage now, but if you recognized the title as the opening line to Moby Dick, then you’ll realize that some names are memorable because they “stand out” from the rest — which is why parents often seek the unusual.  Many of the first names in my family tree wouldn’t have [...]

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You Like Me, You Really Like Me

Today I had the pleasure of receiving two honors from fellow genea-bloggers.  First, Julie over at GenBlog is Feeling the Love and tagged me with the “I ♥ Your Blog” honor.  You are supposed to nominate 7 other blogs that you also love to pass this on.  But, so many genea-bloggers have been “loved” multiple [...]

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10 Essential Books in My Genealogical Library

The 56th Edition of the Carnival of Genealogy asks us to tell about the ten books we can’t do without.  I thought this would be hard at first for two reasons.  First, when I first decided to learn how to research my roots in 1989, my friend Marie and I had no idea how to [...]

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Smile for the Camera: Crowning Glory

The prompt for the 5th Edition of the Smile for the Camera Carnival is Crowning Glory: Show us those wonderful photographs of hairdos and maybe even a few don’ts. Don’t limit yourself to just hair fashion through the ages, got a great photograph of a hat, helmet, bonnet, or some other interesting headgear?
Well, it just [...]

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100th Post!

Today’s a special day at What’s Past is Prologue – it’s my 100th post!  In the blogosphere, 100 is a party-worthy number to reach.  It’s been eight months, 246 days, and almost 65,000 words later.  I have to say, I’m surprised at myself for several reasons.  First, I’m still at it.  (I started a blog [...]

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