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Recent Posts
- Bublick, the Name
- Alvin’s Ashes
- A Tale of Two Houses
- The Daring Mr. Melling
- An Unlikely Farmer
- Julia Swedish Was Not Swedish!
- Finding the Family Farm
- Kay’s 48 in Gay Paree
- Happy Great-Grandmother’s Day
- Love, Yorkshire Style
- Nat Griffin’s Draft Card
- Finding Grandma
- The Irish Connection, Part 2
- The Irish Connection
- Private Frank Elliott, 1897-1917
- The Family That Almost Was
People I know
Author Archives: Fred Coulson
Nat Griffin’s Draft Card
When I was driving through Havre, Montana a while back I decided to stop at the public library to see if they had any books on local history. I wanted to investigate a story I had heard that my grandfather’s … Continue reading
Posted in Genealogy
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Finding Grandma
I never knew my grandmother. As far as I know she never knew me, or even knew I existed. I knew her name, but that was all. After she and my grandfather got divorced it’s as if she fell off … Continue reading
Posted in Genealogy
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The Irish Connection, Part 2
In The Irish Connection, Part 1 we learned that my presumably Scottish family had its origins in Ireland. There’s more to the story, though. To help keep things straight, here’s the family tree so far. A is “young” John, the … Continue reading
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The Irish Connection
My grandfather John was a big fan of all things Scottish. He continued to speak with a brogue (or tried to) despite living in Canada for 64 years, played the bagpipes (until he chopped two fingers off, that’s another story), … Continue reading
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Private Frank Elliott, 1897-1917
Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of my great-uncle Frank (Francis Milligan) Elliott, 1/6 Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, who died in a field hospital in France on May 21, 1917. In commemoration, here is a page I wrote … Continue reading
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The Family That Almost Was
I’ve decided to resurrect this old blog of mine with musings about what I’m learning from genealogy. My grandfather, who died over a quarter-century ago, got bit by the genealogy bug a few years before he died, and he left … Continue reading
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Modality? What’s Modality?
Here’s a comment I received from Paul the other day about my database normalization tutorial: Very nice. Excellent. The only thing I would question would be that a customer could have zero orders. In order to exist as a customer … Continue reading
Posted in Databases
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The whole truth behind candidate keys
A reader of my tutorial on the 3 Normal Forms recently asked: The question is: why was customer_id not used as part of the composite primary key (order_id, customer_id , item_id) in 1NF in the first place? It’s a good … Continue reading
Posted in Databases
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