Month: January 2011

Why I Blog

Posted on by Kathleen

This Monday, I posted my Mystery Monday post on Duncan Walker’s family. When I first started posting Mystery Mondays, it was with the hope that some day I used the right keywords for a Google search to send answers my way. Maybe I’d get lucky and someone would be able to discern a place or the time period of a photo to help me.

This week, more then I expected happened. At some point last week, I received some blog comments from Grace Leonard (Hi Grace!). I quickly shot off an email to her because she’s connected to me through the Love/Menzies line and I just loooove that line (pun intended). Plus it’s so rare that I get people actually researching the same lines as me, I couldn’t let her comments go unanswered!

It turns out Grace is a little more familiar with the Love line then I am! In fact, she could identify Duncan Walker and his family! Oh gosh, it felt like Christmas! According to Grace and the dearly missed Everett Leonard, Duncan Walker married William Wallace Love‘s sister Martha! Now all I have to do is find the documentation to back it up!

Grace also let me know that it isn’t easy to get Jane Menzies-Love‘s death certificate. It’s getting harder and harder to get information about this woman and the circumstances surrounding her death! I’m thinking ordering the 1890 Essex County, NJ deaths microfilm from the Family History Center might be the best bet.  I’m chomping at the bit to get going on my New Jersey research and I think I might overcome my shyness to finally go in and order my first microfilm!

Also, a few changes:

As of yesterday I turned off the captcha filter on the website. I didn’t realize how much people hated it! No one complained to me about it here but if this makes it easier for people to enjoy my blog, then it’s a change I’m more than happy to make! I also turned off the requirement for an email address. Emails are never published on the blog, but they are viewable to me in the administrative side. I was only utilizing that to get back to people who were seeking family information. So if you’re looking for information, be sure to leave your email or look in the sidebar for my email!

Hopefully this blog will be easier to navigate in the coming months when my site redesign is finished. If I have to pull some late nights I’m determined to finish this once and for all! It’s driving me bonkers! I’ve mainly been focusing on the content, but now that I’m into a rhythm, I think it’s time to finally make that design I’ve wanted from the beginning!

Unknown Cityscape

Yes I am still incapable of posting without the use of a picture. 🙂

Organizing my Chaos: Part 4

Posted on by Kathleen

Alright, I’ve researched my supplies, I’ve made plans, and I’ve used trial and error to go through my chaos of papers. All of this with the help of Elyse Doerflinger‘s book Conquering the Paper Monster. If you feel even a little overwhelmed by the task of organizing your genealogy papers, I definitely recommend this book. I’ve changed my methods a million times in the last 10 years. She explains in very easy to understand terms all the technical terms you may be stuck on. The different types of supplies, the terms you should look for in your supplies. There’s so much information in there and I wouldn’t even dream of trying to reiterate it all here! Just go get the ebook, it’s only a couple of bucks. You’ll spend more on your office supplies then you will the book.

Finished crates

What you’re looking at is my finished crates of documents.  It doesn’t look like much, but everything is in sheet protectors and sorted by which line of the family tree they come from. Birth, marriage, and death records are all separated. When I have more documents, I’ll switch to an individual reference number sorting system. Right now, I just don’t have the volume to make that kind of leap. What I realize is I have a bulk of miscellaneous documents for William and Llewellyn, and another bulk for the Taylor line. Most of the Taylor bulk is photocopies or written notes we took during our Eastern Shore trip. Unfortunately, it was before I knew what I was doing. So I don’t have any source information for those things. I’ll have to research that stuff again.

Books, what to do with the books?

The only question I have is what to do with these books. I have a lot of the funeral service guest books, bibles (not family ones, just bibles, like gift bibles), and just general kind of notebooks. How do you go about preserving those? The’re too big to fit into a sheet protector. Right now I have them laid down in the crates for storage but I’m starting to think that a bookcase might have been a better investment, even if I don’t have room for a bookcase at the moment. ha.

Next I’m onto the photos. I’ve already researched the supplies I’m going to need and where I’m going to get them from. I’ve thought about my priorities when it comes to the photos. Since I have so many to begin with, I’m going to focus on the really old ones first. I’m ordering a set of photo archival pages from Light Impressions. I decided on the 6 to a page sheets that are just big enough for all those photos I have from the 1920s-1930s. I am not going to be getting the albums for the pages yet as those are a bit too expensive for my budget right now. I’ll plan on getting those later in the year when I’ve got some extra money again.

Previous Posts

  1. Organizing my Chaos: Part 1
  2. Organizing my Chaos: Part 2
  3. Organizing my Chaos: Part 3

Week 3: Cars

Posted on by Kathleen

It’s time for another 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History post! This week the topic is cars.

Week 3: Cars. What was your first car? Describe the make, model, and color, but also any memories you have of the vehicle. You can also expand on this topic and describe the car(s) your parents drove and any childhood memories attached to it.

I don’t have a drivers license so I don’t have any first car memories yet. I’ll just stick with cars from my childhood. There are two that I remember well, but my family had a lot of cars before that.

Our Station Wagon, May 1994.

The first car of my memory is this old station wagon. Boy did we have this a long time. Don’t ask me why we put a shirt on our dog. It was the 90’s, we did those things for fun. If you look closely, near the back bumper was our other dog, PIB. His original name was Red, but mom eventually just started calling him P.I.B. (Pain in Butt) because he followed me around and was always underfoot. Gosh I miss my Pibbers.

My mom says she finally got a station wagon so the kids would stop complaining, “SHE’S TOUCHING ME!!!! MOOOOOM!! HE HIT ME!” A lot of my younger memories are of this car. Mom used to drive me out to the school bus stop at our old house, the one that we lost to a fire. The driveway was very long and I remember the rides, listening to 98.3 Star FM, our local radio station. You don’t know it but I just sung the jingle. It’s one of those things, I can’t say it without singing the age old jingle. This is the car of my childhood. In fact, I have a lot of memories in the very back of this car. It had two fold up seats in the back. I used to sit back there and play with toys on trips to Ohio. One trip was very memorable. My favorite toy growing up were the Fisher Price Little People. I had more Little People then I did Barbies. I used to set them up in the back of the car and have little towns, including a school bus route.

Nissan Stanza, 1986 model, picture courtesy of Wikimedia.

This is the car of my teenage years. This is the car I remember through middle and high school. I have a lot of pictures of me and my best friend playing around in this one (yet I can find none at hand). Ours was a blue color. We nicknamed it Bessie. I have a habit of naming our cars. It’s a problem, I know but it’s just the way I am. The Nissan was with us for a lot of life moments. It went with me and my friend to all our concerts. I’ll never forget getting lost going to concerts in DC and Virginia in this thing. Oh it was fun. We had this car for a long time, because we replaced the engine at least once. I have memories of sitting in the back of this car on the way to Ohio. Me and my friend would make faces at other drivers on the beltway.

This post is part of a weekly series, 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History, by Amy Coffin. It is being hosted and promoted by GeneaBloggers.

Mystery Monday: Duncan Walker’s Family

Posted on by Kathleen

I love that I’m organizing my research. I love even more that it’s giving me an opportunity to look at every piece of documentation that I have in my possession. Before I started my organization, I was just so overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I had. It was tiring just to look at it. Now I’m making heads and tails of it and finding little clues where I didn’t notice them before. Something as simple as remembering to scan the back of a photograph.

Duncan Walker's Family

At first glance, you might think this is just a normal Christmas car. At least that’s what I thought at first. However, last week I scanned this into my computer and I followed the advice from Elyse Doerflinger’s ebook and I scanned the back too. Why didn’t I do that before? It’s so simple and I should have done that. It doesn’t matter now. The fact is I started my scan project last week and when I scanned the back of the above photograph, a lightbulb went off. In fact, this light bulb was probably one of the brightest light bulbs I’ve had.

As you can see, it says “Duncan Walker’s family.” Then it lists the names of the women in the photograph. The name Walker jumped up and hit me on the head! It was Walkers that are listed on the Love “Diner Tree”! They’re also listed on my Love-Menzies Family Outline that Llewellyn worked on at one point. I have this list in about four different stages, including handwritten. So now I just have to figure out how Duncan Walker is connected to the Loves!

What I know about this photo

  • Duncan Walker is connected to the Love side of my family.
  • This is probably where I inherited my horrible vision from.

What I want to know about this photo

  • How is Duncan Walker and his family connected to the Love side of my family?
Mystery Monday is a series I post here on Mondays. It is also a weekly blogging topic on GeneaBloggers. Feel free to post your own mystery photos and link me to them!