Opening notes

Before I get into the meat of what this blog is going to be, I just wanted to leave a few notes here.

Names: 

For all people's names I use on this blog, I'm using the following format for their first appearance: First Middle "Nickname" (Maiden) Surname. To use someone whose name will be appearing in tomorrow's post as an example, one of my great-great-grandmothers was Katherine Jean "Bema" (Bruce) O'Connor. After I write out someone's full name, I'll use their first name or nickname for the rest of the post, so my example person becomes Katherine or Bema.

Spelling variations are common, especially when you look at older records, so I'll try to explain them if they involve the central person of my post, otherwise I'll probably just pick the most common spelling. To use my example person again, Katherine's first name was sometimes spelled Catherine, and her middle name was sometimes given as Jane.

Places:
For place names in the United States, I use the format City, County, State for the first appearance. For subsequent mentions of the same place name in each post, I use only the city name.

I try my best to apply this same format to other countries, so places in Denmark are City, Municipality, Region, Denmark, and places in Germany are City, District, State, Germany. I've chosen to use the modern administrative boundaries and names.

Dates:

To keep things consistent, dates will be in the format Month Date, Year, with the month fully written out and the date in numerals.

Living people:

I don't intend to write about living family members in order to protect their privacy (although you'd be surprised what's already out there online about all of us). I might mention names here and there where it's relevant, but that's all.

That's all I can think of for now, so please check back tomorrow for my first real genealogy post.