Author Archives: Fred Coulson

Love, Yorkshire Style

Aunty Mary, who died over 30 years ago, is the primary source for much of my earliest Coulson family history. She was born in Wyoming but she must have spent a lot of time listening to her folks, because she … Continue reading

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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

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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

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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

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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

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