After leaving a fun antique store in Fort Ann, New York, this past Sunday, my husband surprised me with a great early Valentine's Day present - an 1874 pocket diary filled with handwritten entries. A first glance offered no name or location for the author, but did mention other names and places throughout the pages. I was instantly intrigued...

Flipping through pages in the diary, one of the first things I ran across was a postscript near the end, stating that it was written nine years after the rest of the diary entries.

"Nine years have passed and I am a contented happy wife and mother among these very people among whom I spent a large share of this year [apparently referring to the year 1874 when she kept this diary]; the same yet has changed. 8 years ago Emma Martin passed triumphly over the river and had an abundant entrance into the mansion over there. Her husband Gurdon Martin is now my husband. I am living in her home, and would that I was taking care of her three boys. I am the mother of four children of whom one little girl goes to school in the same schoolhouse where I taught so long ago. Of my scholars, Albert, Barnet, Alma, Satira and Lucy are married. All are living Christian lives except Will Bohonon, Charles Roberts and Charlie Davis."

I wasn't sure on the spelling of "Gurdon" or if I was just misreading "Gordon," but it turned out to indeed be Gurdon which made my search much easier. I began by searching the 1880 census for a Gurdon/Gordon Martin in the Vermont/New York area because Barre, Vermont was mentioned as a nearby town in one of the diary entries, and the diary itself was found just across the New York/Vermont border in Fort Ann, New York. Sure enough, a simple search brought up a Gurdon Martin living in Williamstown, Orange County, Vermont, with wife M. Ella, and five children from the age of 10 down. M. Ella was listed as "keeping house" and not as a school teacher, but this wasn't surprising given that she was married and had four children of her own by this point if she is indeed my diary's author.

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Genealogist Megan Smolenyak is always curious, and that curiosity has led her to once again ask for help regarding a mystery surrounding Annie Moore, the first immigrant to arrive at Ellis Island. In an article in this week's Huffington Post, she outlines her case for this photo being one of Annie Moore with her brothers upon their arrival at Ellis Island and asks for help from anyone who might be able to provide a clue. What do you think? Can you help?

This morning's press release from the New England Historic Genealogical Society linking President Barack Obama with Scott Brown, the newly elected republican senator from Massachusetts, didn't really surprise me. If you go back far enough, it seems that almost everyone with deep New England roots can find a connection to one another. In this case, the connection is 10th cousins. According to NEHGS staff genealogists Chris Child and David Allen Lambert, Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham and Brown's mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both descend from Richard Singletary of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who did in 1687 at the age of 102. President Obama descends from Richard's eldest son, Jonathan Singletary, who later changed his surname to Dunham. Scott Brown descends from Jonathan's brother, Nathaniel Singletary. Child and Lambert also found that Brown is related to six other U.S. Presidents including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Rutherford B. Hayes.

This month two nifty new genealogy apps have made their way onto my iPhone, which I thought some of you might find interesting.

The first is a great app for iPhone / iPod Touch users of Ancestry.com Family Trees. The free new Ancestry.com Tree to Go iPhone app offers up a lighter version of your family tree that you can easily access on the go. You can search or browse your family tree while at the library, easily add a new tombstone photo right after you take it at the cemetery, or add interview notes directly to your tree as you talk to your relatives.

You can't begin a new Family Tree via the Ancestry.com Tree to Go app (at least not yet), but you can actually scroll through your existing trees a bit easier than is offered online. The navigation is different than what you're used to online (no more pedigree view for example) due to the need for streamlining for the iPhone. You also can't yet search Ancestry.com databases and upload your finds to your tree through the app (thought that will hopefully be available in the future). But even with these limitations, I love the new Ancestry.com Tree to Go app. Download it now for free in the iTunes store and let me know what you think.

The second is an iPhone / iTouch app for Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems Podcast which streams her free genealogy audio and video content on the go (a nice feature for genealogists like me who are always on the go!), and also offers exclusive Bonus Content. The app streams all Genealogy Gems podcast episodes, which cover everything from research strategies to celebrity and family history expert interviews; new episodes are downloaded automatically. While Genealogy Gems podcasts are free online, the new Genealogy Gems app is available for $2.99 from the iTunes Store with exclusive bonus content such as custom genealogy themed wallpaper as well as Cooke's 20 page e-book, 5 Fabulous Google Research Strategies for the Family Historian. More bonus content will be released with future episodes.