Category: Stories

Birthday Cake 2

Birthday Celebrations

As Andrew wrote in last week’s article, we often get inspiration for articles from photographs. Fortunately, I started collecting photos from my Montour County, Pennsylvania family when I was very young, and over the...

Spirit Photography Detail 1

Seeing Ghosts

Ghost (noun): an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image. As genealogists, my father and I see a lot of...

Rotten pumpkin head 1

Digging Up a Headless Hagenbuch

Our Halloween story begins with a newspaper article published on March 28, 1879 in The Colombian. It reads as follows: INVESTIGATING THE DEAD For some days past rumors of a most extravagant nature, concerning...

Homer Hagenbuch Milking Cow Detail 3

Concerning Cows

How’s the Cow? It walks, it talks, it’s full of chalk. The lacteal fluid of the female member of the bovine species is highly prolific to the Nth degree. Some readers of this article...

Roy and Mary Pearl Gutshall, 1918 Detail 0

Cousins Around the Corner

We went to my wife Linda’s 50th High School reunion at Greencastle, Pennsylvania a few weeks ago. Greencastle has a different way of scheduling their school reunions. The reunions coincide with the town’s Old...