Web Roundup - July 4

It's the news for which we've all been waiting! (I want to downgrade!)


Washington's boyhood home has been discovered by archaeologists.

Harold at Midwestern Microhistory shares a tip about searching geographic information in BYU's digital collections. I've added this site to my del.icio.us bookmarks!

Lesa shared a wonderful story about her family vacations when she was a child in her post about forgotten books. I'm just trying to picture 30 books plus all the other things the family must have had to bring along in that van! I wonder if today's children will have similar stories of their "staycations."

Thanks to Becky for bringing back memories of what I used to do on the 4th of July.

The Cincinnati Enquirer has an interesting story about a Revolutionary War patriot and his burial location--possibly in the ball park!

Morristown Power Outage

Last Friday night, 2/3 of Morristown was without power. I was driving back from Knoxville and had noticed the outage as I got into town. I was very grateful that those of us who lived in the county had power, but it's pretty bad when your grocery store is pitch black. Morristown's paper does not publish on Saturday, but on Sunday morning we discovered what the cause of the outage was. It's one of those things that is too good to give away so I'll let you read all about it in the Citizen Tribune.

Done Travelling for Awhile

I'm back home in Tennessee now, and I should be home for awhile. I was fortunate to find gas for $3.819 on the way back home so I didn't have to pay the national average which is over $4 per gallon.

We are supposed to have thunderstorms tonight, but I'm glad they held off while I was driving. Brumley was happy to be with me although I think he misses his grandparents. He hasn't fussed at me though for bringing him home.

Web Roundup - June 18

The 50th Carnival of Genealogy is up at West in New England. It's all about pets!



When I read this in the paper this morning, I was surprised that someone hadn't made this discovery years ago. All it took was a look in a deed book.

Reunited

I am now reunited with my cat. I drove to Mississippi today to pick him up from his visit with his grandparents. I brought him a lobster (not a live one - one that was filled with catnip). I have never seen him so enthusiastic over something as he has been that lobster. I promise a picture later, but I'm too tired to download the pictures from the camera and then upload it here tonight.

When I arrived, I discovered that there was a leak in the air conditioning unit in the house. I had to deal with a little water on the floor and under the carpet in a closet. I just happened to hear the drip. The air-conditioning man who came out to find the cause of the problem found that something had been connected wrong for a long time and said that they were lucky they hadn't had more problems than they had. I tried to find someone with a shop vac, but I was unsuccessful. I ended up using a mop and towels for the cement floor under the a/c. I ran to Wal-Mart and got a wet/dry hand-held dust buster type appliance and a fan for the closet.

Reading Roundup - May 20

At Genealogy: Digging Up Dirt, there is a blog entry that details a most interesting murder case from the 19th century. One of the suspects is a John H. Dearborn, whom I would assume descends from Godfrey Dearborn. Since I'm a descendant of Godfrey, this really caught my interest. I may even have to see how I'm related to this "black sheep" family member!





Birmingham Genealogical Society tells us about the Alabama Department of Archives and History's 1867 Voter Registration database. The actual database is at the ADAH site. I'm excited that Walker County is there, but I'd like to see Fayette. I also wish that women had voting rights back then!



Paula has come up with quite a list of prizes for cooperating with the census taker. Of course, I think the census taker just didn't find the "holler" my ancestors lived in on some census years. They lived in an area of Monroe County known as the "Lost Corner." The only way to get there was to go up into Itawamba County and then back down into Monroe. I think the census taker just stopped at the county line and didn't try to track them down!



Footnote.com sent a newsletter. The Mississippi Confederate soldiers database is posted. I know what I'll be busy checking out! (Tennessee, South Carolina, and Louisiana have also been added. The Dawes packets are also available now.)



Stealing the Cat in the Hat.



Terry has really gotten Mississippi on the radar screen of a lot of bloggers. Randy is now using Mississippi as a search example!



Demolition Alert: It involves Paul Revere.

Reading Roundup - May 6

I think all of us can relate to Marshall's cartoon and also to Jim Borgman's.


Thomas found a rather interesting obituary. It's written from a first-person point of view.

I love mysteries. Lesa posted the winners of this year's Edgar awards.

I love baking. Janice has just provided several old cake recipes. I love reading those old ones!


Most of you know that I love my Tennessee Volunteers. Rob Huddleston has written an excellent tribute to our star basketball guard who played this last year through cancer. Until this week, most of us never knew what he was going through.

Here's the latest edition of the Carnival of Genealogy. Since it is on home towns, you'll find it arranged by continent, country, state, province, etc. The next edition will be a mother's day theme. Each person is supposed to talk about their mother's education.

Thomas shared the interesting obituary of Dot Cully. This is the second obituary of his that I'm sharing in this post!

A couple of reading challenges--The Southern Reading Challenge by Maggie and the May Book Binge. I don't know yet what I'll read for Maggie's challenge, but I'm sure I'll participate.

[Update - List of Books Read]

Gilmore, Susan Gregg. Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen. (read 29 May 2008)

Allen, Sarah Addison. Garden Spells. (read 2 July 2008)

[end update]

{Best thing since sliced bread? (Tip of the hat to Glenn.) I'll keep thinking about it. I'm not completely sold yet.

The last day of the semester is tomorrow. Graduation is Friday night. I am planning a week of R&R and no blogging beginning Saturday the 10th and running through the 17th!

Web Roundup - May 1

Open Source applications are becoming more sophisticated all the time. Here's a list of 50 useful open source applications for online writers.

I loved "Now is the month of Maying" over at Walking the Berkshires. I had not thought of a Maypole in years!

I talked to someone down in Amory in the Hill Country of Northeast Mississippi today who told me they'd read Terry's column where he rambled about everyone who lived up in the hills. Let's hope he keeps on rambling!

A few free online books of interest to genealogists and family historians can be found in the University of California Press' eScholarship editions.

Do you have Virginia ancestry? You might want to check out the site that has tax lists from 1790-1800 on it. (Hat tip to Arlene) I added this to my del.icio.us bookmarks!

Thomas shared a photo of his retro barbershop. Barbershops are becoming few and far between in the South.

This week's question to stitching bloggers will generate some responses of interest to family history lovers. A few are already posted.

The Great Smoky Mountains is a popular tourist destination, but those of us in East Tennessee need to offer a word of advice to all of you who might be thinking of coming through Knoxville this summer. Find an alternate route. Interstate 40 is closed through downtown Knoxville until the "Smart Fix 40" project which will provide additional lanes (which is desperately needed) is complete. In the meantime, traffic is being re-routed along I-640. Expect heavy traffic and possible delays. I've got my alternate routes planned when I can avoid Knoxville. Randy has a good roundup on Smart Fix 40 on his blog.

Earlier today, someone posted a link to the Old Bailey Online on a listserv for genealogical librarians. If you are researching English ancestors who might have had a run-in with the law, you might want to check their online court proceedings.

I fell in love with Jasia's Wordless Wednesday post.

The 5th Carnival of Irish Heritage & Culture has been posted.

Ruth found John F. Kennedy in Mississippi. (Okay - so it's a century too early for the president, but it makes an interesting post.)

Apologies

My apologies for no posts the past couple of days. You know how it is -- you start entering data and citing it in your genealogy database and lose track of time. Before you know it, it's time to go to bed! At least I've been making good use of my time.

I found some research on one of the lines I'll be working on in Massachusetts that I'd somehow failed to enter into my database. It's much easier to enter it before I go so that I don't have to lug the photocopies and handwritten notes along which adds weight to the luggage! I want to make sure I don't duplicate research I've already done just because I didn't enter the information!

Blogger has a scheduled outage shortly so I'd better keep this short!

Reading Roundup 4/12/08

April 19-20, 2008 are the dates for the Civil War Living History weekend at Ramsey House in Knoxville. Read about the event at KnoxViews.

I can't wait for Smokey Mountain Breakdown to post the photo that goes along with these tasty-sounding sweet potato fries. (The recipe calls for sesame seeds and Cajun seasoning.)

Suitable for Mixed Company has a post with lots of interesting links -- a history of America's first hospital and a look at one of those stories that gets passed around the Internet with links to a 1912 sermon from which it was likely taken. (Did you notice my use of "my punctuation mark" -- the dash?)

Amory, Mississippi's Railroad Festival starts on Thursday. I was in middle school when the first of these was held. I remember Steam Train Maury Graham's visit to an assembly at our school that year. We were all able to take train rides along the old Mississippian Railway. I got to ride at least twice that year. I see that there is no hobo parade this year. I've heard a rumor that this may be the last year for the festival. I hope that's not the case. Every town needs a festival of some sort -- and with Amory's railroad heritage, it seems fitting.

Which Punctuation Mark Are You? (Sorry - I couldn't resist this one)

You Are a Dash

Your life is fast paced and varied. You are realistic, down to earth, and very honest. You're often busy doing something interesting, and what you do changes quickly. You have many facets to your personality, and you connect them together well. You have a ton of interests. While some of them are a bit offbeat, they all tie together well. You friends rely on you to bring novelty and excitement to their lives. (And while you're the most interesting person they know, they can't help feeling like they don't know you well.) You excel in: Anything to do with money You get along best with: the Exclamation Point

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

Sunday Night Ramblings

I'm sitting here watching the NCAA women's tournament and catching up on some blog reading.

Mass Moments has a post about John Calipari leading UMass to the Final Four in 1996. Well, in 2008, he's still leading a team to the Final Four, but it's a different U. of M. This time it's Memphis.

Dear Myrtle linked to the thread at 43 Things about taking a genealogy trip this year. I take at least one genealogy trip each year. This year's trip is to Boston. That may not be my only genealogy trip this year, but it's the only one I'm planning right now.

The next Carnival of Genealogy is on cars. Several people have already begun to post their car-related posts, but I spotted an unexpected car post which I'm sure won't be entered in the Carnival of Genealogy since it's not on a genealogy blog. Check out Wallet Pop's "How to Beat the Car Dealers at Their Own Game."

Now, I've got to run and see if I can dig up any old car photos for my next Carnival post. I honestly don't know if I'll succeed or not. I don't remember taking photos of cars. I wish I had a photo of one of my brother's cars. So tune in later, I'm sure that I'll be just as surprised by my post as you will!

The Yankee Type?

While I was in Facebook, I noticed that a friend had added the application for "Which state should you live in?" I knew from the past that a lot of these apps start out as online quizzes, so I thought I'd Google the question and see if I could find it. It was quite easy to find "Which State Should You Live In?" I took the quiz, but I'll have to admit to being surprised by the results. There were misspelled words and phrases throughout the questionnaire so I decided not to use the little "blog blurb" provided; however, I was pegged as a "Yankee type." They suggested that I'd never enjoyed a bowl of grits. I've lived in the South, and I do enjoy grits--the real kind, not the quick-cooking ones. They also said that I'd probably never been to a NASCAR "game." Since when is NASCAR a game? I thought it was a race, but they are correct that I've never been to one even though I'm only about an hour from the Bristol Motor Speedway. I think driving around in circles just to crash and/or burn is stupid! They suggested that New Hampshire would be a good place for me to live. If I did that, I'd have to change this blog's name to the "White Mountains Family Historian." HEHEHE I have nothing against New Hampshire. I had lots of ancestors who lived there. I'm looking forward to visiting New Hampshire this summer. It sounds like I might meet a lot of kindred spirits there.

Lost and Found

I'm so excited. Today I began clearing out part of my parents' attic. I had a lot of stuff that was up there that had been in their old house. When they moved to this house, they put a lot of my stuff up in the attic rather than in the room that I use when I'm in town. The exception to this were my yearbooks. The only problem was that my 3rd grade yearbook was missing. Since most of the other books which had been around it on the shelf at the old house were on the shelf, I just assumed that it had been accidentally thrown out during the move. I should explain that my first and second grade yearbooks were books that contained grades 1-12. This was back when kindergartens were all private instead of part of the public school system (at least where I lived). Anyway, when our third grade yearbooks arrived, I remember being so disappointed. Instead of the nice yearbook with all grades, we had a little paperback with only grades 1-3. That was all that was in East Amory Elementary, so that's all we got. We did not have yearbooks for the years that I was in 4th through 8th grades because there were none produced for West Amory Elementary or Amory Middle School. I really regret that we don't have those because I had some friends who lived here only a short time, and they were during those years. Of course, the high school always kept the Panorama going, and I have all four of those books. I'm glad that my 3rd grade yearbook has now been found!

Something else that I was excited to find was an old diary belonging to my grandmother. It appears to have been from the 1970s and mentioned visits from her friends. I also found some of my mom's books that she was very happy to rediscover.

On the Radio

As I was driving through Knoxville this morning, Alison, one of the morning drive personalities on WIVK, was saying that she had recently gotten interested in learning about her family and had spent time at the Ellis Island site and had found some pretty interesting stuff, like when her grandparents had immigrated and stuff. I immediately wondered if her ancestors were Irish, and I also had a million things that I wanted to tell her--like to make sure she wrote down citations for what she was using and many of the other tips that many of us have been sharing lately on the memes about 3 things we wished we'd done when we first started. I was one of those person who actually did a decent job citing stuff--it's just that my citation were all handwritten because I started with an inadequate database program (at least by today's standards). It was either shareware or freeware so it was the right price back in those days, and I wish I'd investigated other options that were available. Later, as I was driving somewhere between Knoxville and Chattanooga, Alison was nice enough to state that she knew she was Irish because her grandparents had immigrated from there. The end of my wondering about her ethnic origin (at least the Ellis Island portion) was over. I'm glad she cleared that up before I got past the station's signal. It's really nice to hear radio personalities get excited about family history. I hope that Alison will continue her search for her ancestry. I hope others will get excited too.

Reading Roundup 3/14/08

John Michael Neill demonstrates how easy it is to upload your own scanned documents to Footnote.com.

Randy comments on the value of conference syllabi to those who were not able to attend. I must confess that I'm a huge fan of these. I refer to the ones from conferences attended and from ones I've purchased online when unable to attend. If a national conference is in a state in which you had ancestors or adjacent to such a state, you really should try to purchase a copy. You'll pick up great information in any of the syllabi, but these will offer you even more because many of the lectures will be dealing with records in that area.

Terry amuses me when his claim to Irish ancestry are those e-mails that tell you that you've won an Irish lottery.

I realized that I haven't commented on this. One of my Christmas presents this year was a DVD set of season one of WKRP in Cincinnati. The biggest problem is that they have changed the music from the original version. As someone who not only saw the originals but also saw the reruns when the original music was still being included, I can say that there's definitely something missing from these DVDs, and it's the music. You can find a list of all the music changes here. Another review is here with an addendum here. I do miss the music, but the querky characters are still around.

One of the books in my stash of books to be read soon is authored by Louise Penny. Lesa describes meeting this author at the Poisoned Pen bookstore. It's a very interesting post, and I will have to read the Three Pines mystery soon.

A Baptist looks at St. Patrick and concludes he is a role model.

I was searching the New York Times archives earlier today and found a story dated 6 Mar 1855 about the explosion of the tugboat Thomas McDaniels. The explosion presumably occurred around New Orleans since it appeared in the New Orleans Picayune 27 February 1855. Among those injured was pilot Daniel Taylor. Stephen Taylor, father of Laura Lucy Taylor, had a brother named Daniel Taylor who was enumerated as a boatman in the 1850 Peoria, Peoria Co., Illinois census. In that household was a James H. Taylor, age 12. I have seen James listed as a son of Daniel; however, evidence based on the 1850 census is inconclusive as James is enumerated below children younger than he is. However, James is very likely related to the family. Also listed among the injured of the tugboat is a fireman named James Taylor. Listed among the dead is a William Taylor, and if Daniel had a son named William, I don't know about it. It is possible that Daniel had a son named William who was living on his own or with a wife at the time of the 1850 census. I have gaps in the children where such a possibility might exist. Daniel later lived in DeSoto, Jefferson County, Missouri. Now, my question is: Is this Daniel Taylor who was in the tugboat accident Laura Lucy Taylor's uncle? I don't have an answer to that question. It may just be coincidence.

If any of you are up on your Irish movie trivia, you might want to guess Maggie's Irish movie meme quotes.

Baby Name Meme

Randy wants to know "if you had a chance to name your children again, what names would you choose to honor your ancestors?"

I have no children so I'm going to rephrase it and ask what I'd name children if I had them to honor my ancestors.

Girls:

Laura Elizabeth - This would honor Laura Lucy Taylor and her mother Elizabeth "Betsey" Dearborn Taylor. Laura was actually supposed to have been my name, but my cousin came along a few months before I did and "stole my name."

Daisy Marie - This would honor an aunt and a great aunt. I like the name Daisy, and since I used Elizabeth in the above name, I had to find something that sounded good as a middle name.

Other female names I might use would include Hannah and Abigail (since I could call the girl "Abby") which would honor direct-line colonial ancestors.

Boys:

James Stephen - I have so many ancestors named James that I would certainly have to use that name. There's a lot of James Thorntons; there are also James Allred

John Thomas - I have John E. Fowlkes, John Hester, and a lot of John Perkins. Thomas would honor Thomas Duke as well as several Thomas Perkins.

Other direct-line names include Nathan, Benjamin, Samuel, Isaac, Richard, and many others which could be used.

Names I wouldn't use:

Female - Gillie, Ursula, Nona, Berniece, Estelle, Henrietta, Selah, Lovica.

Male - Drewry, Prince, Archibald, Capus, Isham, Gabriel, Godfrey.

I'm sure I could come up with more of those if I spent more time thinking!

Bucket List Meme

I saw this meme at Janice's Cow Hampshire blog, but it originated at Passing It On. Those of you who remember the movie The Bucket List will know the gist of the movie is that a couple of older persons have made a list of things they want to do before they "kick the bucket". The meme is to name three places from your family history that you want to visit. I am going to leave off a couple of places that I'm visiting very soon that might be potentials for this list.

Block Island - This is a little island off the coast of Rhode Island. My Rathbone family was among the island's original English settlers.

England - Most of my lines eventually lead to England. The Perkins family came from Hillmorton Parish. This little parish is now a part of Rugby in Warwickshire. Other lines lead to the London area and to Wherwell in Hampshire.

Switzerland - My Amish lines originate here. I have found lines in the cantons of Basel and Berne

I'll probably wait on the last two until the dollar is in a more favorable position against the Euro and pound.

Reading Roundup 3/10/08

A link to this article about the state of libraries in the United Kingdom was posted in the comments of one of my posts. I wanted to share it with everyone. It appears that we Americans aren't the only ones seeing a decline in literacy. I really enjoyed the following quote from that article:

Reading is demanding, especially for children. It requires more attention and concentration than checking your emails or listening to music. If those other options are provided, as they are in our new look libraries sorry, think centres then children will take them, and who can blame them? Reading is the path of most resistance. Ultimately it is the path of most reward, too, but you can't expect a child to know that instinctively when all the cultural signposts around them are saying the opposite.

I enjoyed Mass Moment's post on Plum Island.



Brumley also received a post to read from someone who read his post the day he hijacked my blog. I can only hope that Brumley doesn't take up some of the vocabulary found in the post.

New Hampshire Photo Tour's Drift photo is making me wish that our weekend snow had stuck. [But then, anyone who reads my blog regularly knows how much I miss having snow that sticks. The 15 inches they got in Cincinnati over the weekend made me reminisce about the last time I saw that much.]

Jeremiah People

We had the Jeremiah People at church today. It had been at least 25 years since I'd last seen this group perform. For those of you not familiar with them, they are a Christian musical theatre group. It was nice to see them again after all these years. I think that a lot of people enjoyed having something a little different. The evening program was about 2 hours from start to finish (with the love offering).