2024 #52Ancestors, Week 21: Nicknames

 This post was moved to the Collecting Dead People blog:

Nicknames

2024 #52Ancestors, Week 20: Taking Care of Business

This post was moved to the Collecting Dead People blog:

Taking Care of Business

#52Ancestors #Week22 #Creativity

As a woman of a certain age, I'm quite familiar with advice on keeping your brain sharp.  Crosswords, they say.

Well, just lately as Cuzzin Rachel and I try to untangle to supporting lines of our Pearson ancestors, we've had to be plenty creative.  For instance, how many ways can one spell "John Staton"? There are John, Jon, possible Jonathans, the archaic abbreviation Jno., and Jack.  And the surname has been spelled variously as Stanton, Staten (like the island), Staton, Stayton and Stayden. If we're looking at handwritten documents from the 1700 and early 1800's, "S" is written as "F", and best of luck making out most of the rest.

Trying to use the "Find" feature in lengthy documents or indexes is even more challenging when your many-times great grandfather's surname is "Field." There are a lot of them, too.  An old Virginia family, with English names like John and Jane here as well, although they kindly named one son Obadiah.

The other place where we essentially have to play something akin to paper Jenga is maps or land records. County boundaries changed frequently, forming new counties of (often) two or three pieces from mutliple older counties. With sometimes slim or missing residential information, we have a group of about 7 counties in Kentucky that I look at regularly for the same people.

Who needs crosswords? (With apologies to my crossword partner, you know who you are!)

2024 #52Ancestors, Week 19: Preserve

Let's talk about the difficulties of preserving family history.  If you're like me, you have a full-time job that takes up much of your time - time that you would much rather be spending tracking down elusive ancestors.  Maybe you are also raising children.  I have a daughter.  She is in elementary school, so her folder must be checked and emptied every night, and there are always birthday party invitations to consider and permission slips to be signed.  On top of these responsibilities, we also have a yard to maintain and a vegetable garden to manage.  The garden is substantial - it used to be a 20x40 in-ground pool.  Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I steal an hour or two in the evenings to work on genealogical mysteries with my distant cousin, Heather.  What I'm saying here is that preserving family history takes time.

Time, however, is not the only necessity.

I inherited this stack of boxes from my grandparents when my maternal grandfather passed away in 2022.  I have sifted through them multiple times, trying to organize the photos into Grandma's side or Grandpa's side.  I have made some progress, but as you can probably tell from the items unrelated to genealogy piled in the foreground, these boxes have been sitting on the table for some time.  In fact, these photos have been sitting on a table in our dining room since October of last year.  They had been sitting on the floor in my library, but we rescued a dog, and I didn't want to risk finding out the hard way that he was a chewer.

Speaking of the library, this old TV stand has been repurposed into a coffee table for our book room.  Inside it, you will find another collection of genealogy materials.  I have my mother's DAR application (putting in my own application has been on my to-do list for some time), a cabinet card album full of my great grandparents' relatives, a book on dating photos using fashion, an assortment of pictures my dad gave me of his aunts and uncles, books detailing the tips and tricks of genealogy, a CD of information about my Arter relatives...and who knows what else.  The point is that while preserving family history takes time, it also takes space.  

You might ask, what is the point of this post?  Just this.  Thank your family preservationist because he/she has certainly dedicated more time and space to this calling than you realize.

2024 #52 Ancestors #Week19 - Preservation

When I saw this prompt, thoughts immediately went to my maternal grandma's strawberry freezer jam. I can't write much about that, except to say that it was a delicious treat, that I miss it - yes, I know I could learn to make it - and that I have a strawberry tattooed on my right arm in her memory.

I confess to being more than a bit obsessed with family photos (the older the better) and I spend most evenings chatting with my lovely Cuzzin, not always solely about genealogy but at least mentioned almost every day. I enjoy the research, the "hunt" as it were, more than most other hobbies or genealogically related tasks, and I enjoy sharing what I've learned.

The chore of preserving the "finds" properly never ends, and I am still learning to site my sources. This is a significant learning curve when one web link or note noted down 20 years ago leans to many a rabbit trail and too often, few actual discoveries.

I plan to leave everything to my youngest daughter, who shares my interest, and anything that she doesn't care to keep can be donated to the library or historical society. In that interest, getting scraps of paper and their sources documented properly, photos sorted and labelled and everything in some semblance of order is extremely important, as well as making sure much of this is digitized. This is a project I thought I might make some headway on this year, but it hasn't worked out that way quite yet. Binders and boxes and piles, oh my!

Meanwhile, I'll keep recording bits and pieces here until the heavy lifting gets a bit more traction!

2024 #52Ancestors, Week 18: Love, Marriage, and Divorce

Something that you hear frequently is that "divorces just weren't that common back in the day."  As I have researched various family lines, I have found this to be distinctly untrue.  I tried to come up with a unique spin for Week 18's Love and Marriage prompt, but it just seems to make the most sense to link to some of my previous posts where love leads to marriage...and then to divorce.

Nettie M. Pearson (divorced in approximately 1915, 1916, 1917, 1933, 1939, and 1945)
Nettie wins the prize for marriages/divorces with a grand total of six husbands. The link above only mentions five of them, but I have recently uncovered a marriage to Ansel Gus Hursey in May of 1917. This brief marriage occurs between her marriages to Roy Hudson and Walter Miller. While I do not have divorce documentation for each marriage, I do have divorce dates for "The Two Walters." I also know that none of these marriages ended due to the death of the husband.

Jennie Grace Terpinitz (divorced in 1936 and 1941)

Jennie was a highly educated and independent woman, but she was married three times and divorced at least twice. As I don't know what happened to her after she returned from World War II, it is possible her third marriage ended in divorce as well.

Dora Isabelle Green (divorced in approximately 1882 and again before 1895)
This sister to my great great grandmother was married and divorced twice, and her third marriage ended with the death of her husband.

Ann Elizabeth Echols (divorced in 1869)
My great great great grandmother is my earliest documented divorce. She and Thomas Green divorced in 1869 after she could no longer handle the changes in his personality caused by his Civil War service.

And if you're looking for a divorce record, I recommend checking out Dade County, Florida.