My Grandfather is the young child front and center. The older girl is holding him up.
Things I want to know about this picture
Who are the other children?
If they are related, which side of the family are they from? William’s? Llewellyn’s?
If it is through Llewellyn, then is it through the Thorwards or the Loves?
It could be a collection of children from different families, a family reunion maybe?
Mystery Monday is an ongoing series I’m doing to showcase the photos I am having problems identifying. I hope one day someone will land on the site and recognize a relative!
1982, Washington DC. Wayne and Emogene Utter. Mary Greene.
We have a Museum Sunday tradition in our house now. About once a month, we all go up to a Smithsonian Museum and just take it in for the day. We’ve done two already. This Sunday, I’m a little sentimental about my Grandma and Wayne. They’ve both been gone about 5 years now. 2005 was such a tough year. My Grandma’s biggest fear was that the family would never see each other after she was gone. We all laughed and said it would never happen. The last two years I’ve seen it start happening. I don’t know what happened to us, but everyone is going their own way for awhile I guess.
The above picture is from a trip that my Grandma, Wayne, and Great Aunt Mary (Grandma’s sister) made to visit my family before I was born. I have a few pictures of them around DC with my very young, older brother. I can’t help but think how cool it would have been to be able to see these kinds of sights with my Grandma now. I miss her so much some times!
2010, Washington DC.
She was so proud of my genealogy research. Sometimes I would call her with a discovery:
Me: “Grandma! Did you know Lula’s mother was married before and had a son from that marriage?!”
Grandma: “Yeah, his name was James.”
Me: “Oh.”
Those are the calls I miss the most. She always gave me just enough to keep me going but she always let me find things on my own. I appreciate that now because it’s so much more satisfying to know you’ve put the work in yourself.
Sentimental Sunday is a daily blogging topic from GeneaBloggers.
One thing I forgot to do when I started my family tree many moons ago was document what my immediate family was doing and when. I don’t know why I didn’t think it was important. How many times to I get frustrated that someone just up and moved to a whole new state? Well, I should be ashamed of myself for feeling that way! My brother moved to Miami, Florida shortly after he graduated high school and I never made note of it. Don’t worry I’ve corrected that mistake!
My new mission is seeking out the dates of where and what my family was doing. We moved around quite a bit compared to previous generations. I want to at least make notes of it. I used to have all my Mom’s family homes marked in Google Earth but I didn’t know at the time how to back those up and lost them in a computer crash. I hope she doesn’t mind going over it again.
One of the valuable pieces of documentation given to me was my Dad’s Marine Corps DD-214. It’s basically a discharge paper you get when you are exiting the military. That’s his boot camp graduation photo up top, and I made sure to log that into my family file too. In my scanned image I didn’t crop out the graduation date and officers that are listed along the bottom of the photo, I’m sure I’ll want those later in case of file corruption.
Now all I have to do is figure out which one is my 17 year old father.
In my eyes, marriage records are a beautiful thing. I could say it’s beautiful to know a couple started their life together. That’s very true. However, my favorite part of marriage records is that they have maiden names and parent names for the women. One of my oldest and most often gripes is trying to figure out where the girls in the family disappeared to, or where they came from. It’s a common one among all genealogists.
This particular marriage record really opened up doors in my research. The biggest one being Jane’s last name. We knew it was Parkins/Perkins something. This verified for me that it was in fact Parkin. The great thing about this is it even went a step further and gave me her parents names. I’m not always so lucky to get all these facts. In fact, I was hesitant about this record when I got it because my Aunt had told me she always understood that Jane led a hard life and was orphaned young. That is all true. So I was worried that the information on her parents wouldn’t be known at the time of her wedding. From this record, I was even able to find that Jane and her siblings may have been orphaned and they did bounce around a lot, but it was always to other family members. I can’t speak for what happened in those households, but at least the family names were kept in memory so that I could find them today.
Treasure Chest Thursday is a daily blogging topic from GeneaBloggers that I occasionally participate in.
Apparently when you’re researching your family history in Scotland, your Google Earth knowledge doesn’t help a whole lot. It helps for sure, but it’s hard to really see the lay of the land so to speak. I found two great maps though that really helped me. I found these through Google Image Searches. – I really don’t get paid by Google to say these things all the time, I just REALLY like Google. –
Scotland Clan Map. Wikimedia
The first one is this Clan Map. There are all kinds of clan maps around. I like this one because it’s basic and easy to read. I just wanted to see a general area of where the Clans were based.
Scotland Administrative Subdivisions. Wikimedia
This second one is a map of the Civil Districts/Counties. It’s hard when you’re researching a country you have little prior knowledge of. When I was trying to see where exactly the Menzies and Loves were turning up in Parish records and censuses I needed maps. Maps that didn’t over complicate things and required constant scrolling and zooming. I was amazed at how helpful this simple map turned out to be!
Both maps were found on Wikipedia/Wikimedia through the magnificent power of Google. They both now live on my hard drive where I feed them twice a day… Okay sorry, that was over the top. You can see the large, full size versions by clicking on the pictures. Enjoy!
