In 2011, I posted one picture from my great-grandmother’s collection. It was of a Decoration Day parade in Caldwell, New Jersey. Here is another few pictures from that same day. I happen to also know thanks to Llewellyn’s diary, that her and her mother used to volunteer with her church to decorate the graves of veterans also. She sure was one great lady. I am thinking of all our fallen soldiers today.
Randy Seaver has posted another great Saturday Night Genealogy Fun topic! The mission this week is to list the occupations of my ancestors. Well, I certainly can do that! To protect privacy, I will omit anyone who is still living.
Randy suggested using the Ancestor Chart number for each person, so here we go!
4. William Thorward Moore (1930-2012)
Odd jobs
Police Officer in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
Police Chief in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
5. Florence Jean Redford (1930-2001)
Housewife
A&P Cashier in Denville, New Jersey.
6. Stanley Lee Mays (1923-1976)
Farmer
U.S. Army during WWII
Farmer
7. Emogene Taylor (1929-2005)
Various odd jobs
Housewife
8. William Lawrence Moore (1901-1980)
Bookkeeper
Clerk
Assistant Stenographer
Senior Accountant – AT&T, for over 30 years
9. Llewellyn Josephine Thorward (1899-1986)
Bookkeeper, Insurance Company, 1920s.
Housewife
10. Clifford Herbert Redford (1894-1955)
Phonograph Errand Boy, (1910 Census)
Plumber, (WWI Draft Card, 1920 Census, 1930 Census)
Maintenance Man – Battery Manufacturing (1940 Census)
11. Jane Mable Parkin (1896-1957)
Phonograph Inspector (1920 Census)
Housewife
12. William Harmon Mays (1872-1952)
Farmer
13. Iva Belle Moyer (1894-1949)
Housewife
14. Marshall Howard Taylor (1892-1958)
Farmer
15. Lula Margaret Applegate (1901-1978)
Housewife
Cashier at Coney Island Amusement Park in New Richmond, Ohio.
16. Robert James Moore (1871-1925)
House Painter (1892-1915)
17. Mary E. Johnson (1873-?)
Housewife
18. Lewis Thorward (1875-1946)
Butcher at Vanderhoof and Wilton Market.
Butcher at Thorward and Van Duyne’s Market
Butcher at Thorward Meat Market
19. Jennie Viola Love (1876-1960)
Housewife
20. Herbert Redford (1872-1940)
Hatter (1900-1940 Census)
21. Sarah Ann Sutcliffe (1873-1924?)
Housewife
22. John Walter Parkin (1863-190?)
Sandpaper Factory (1880 Census)
Motorman (1900 Census)
I think that is enough for now, but it was fun to see. 🙂
Herbert Redford happens to be one of my favorite ancestors. I know I’m not supposed to play favorites but I just can’t help it. He is the first ancestor whose record I sent away for. I was so excited and it took quite a long time. It was well worth it though. 🙂 Plus I have this photo I believe to be him. It was passed down through the family and I was given a photocopy of it where someone identified him as “Herbert Redford”.
November 14, 1872
Herbert Redford is born to Samuel Redford and Frances Wright Travis in Bloomfield, New Jersey. He is their second child and second son.
October 7, 1874
Herbert‘s first sister, Sarah Elizabeth Redford is born in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
September 30, 1877
Herbert‘s little brother Samuel dies shortly after he was born.
Note: Index entry, need to obtain original.
April 23, 1879
Herbert‘s little sister, Lillian Redford is born.
June 1880
Herbert is 7 years old living in East Orange, New Jersey. He is going to school with his older brother William. His dad is working as a hat manufacturer, which is a trade that was passed down from Frances Travis-Redford‘s family.
March 20, 1894
Herbert marries my 2nd great grandmother Sarah (Sadie) Ann Sutcliffe (daughter of Paul Sutcliffe and Mary S. Senior) in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Herbert lists his occupation as Hatter, continuing the occupation to the fourth generation through his mother’s family. Both Herbert and Sadie were 21 at the time of their marriage.
October 29, 1894
My great grandfather, Clifford Herbert Redford is born in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
Note: Index entry, need to obtain original.
1895
New Jersey took a census in 1895. Herbert, Sadie, and Clifford are living in Bloomfield with Herbert’s parents and siblings.
September 28, 1897
Herbert‘s father Samuel dies in Bloomfield, New Jersey. His age is about 54, I do not currently have his birth record or know where it is.
Note: Index entry, need to obtain original.
December 18, 1897
Herbert and Sadie‘s second child Howard Redford is born in Orange, New Jersey.
April 13, 1899
Herbert and Sadie‘s first daughter, Edith Redford, is born in West Orange, New Jersey.
June 1900
The United States Census rolls around again. Herbert and Sadie are now living on Whittley Avenue in West Orange. They own their home but have a mortgage. His sister Sarah Redford-Tinston and her husband are living with the family.
June 1905
Herbert is enumerated in Essex County, New Jersey in the State Census. He is living with his wife Sadie and their three children. Also living in the house is Herbert‘s brother William and William’s son Harry Redford, age 10. Herbert‘s mother Frances Travis-Redford is also living in the household. They own their home but have a mortgage on it.
Note: I will have to go to the State Archives to see the actual census. All I have online is an index. 🙂
August 29, 1906
Herbert and Sadie‘s fourth child, Lillian Elizabeth Redford, is born.
April 1910
Herbert is working as a hat finisher. He has been married for 17 years and they have 4 total children now, with all still living. His brother William is still living with him and is also working at a hat factory. William’s son is now living in Los Angeles, California with his aunt Sarah Redford-Tinston. Herbert’s mother Frances is now living with her daughter Lillian Redford-Stemmle. They live at 16 Gist Place, Orange, New Jersey and they pay rent.
1912
According to a 1912 Orange, New Jersey city directory, Frances Travis-Redford (wid of Samuel), removes to Los Angeles, California.
September 12, 1919
Herbert fills out a World War I Draft Registration Card. There is no evidence he ever had any military service. His occupation is listed as Hatter. He is described as being short (tell me about it. haha), Medium build and he had blue eyes and brown hair. He gives his address as 16 Gist Place, Orange, New Jersey.
January 1920
Herbert and Sadie are still renting their house at 16 Gist Place. He is still employed at a Hatter. Their sons Clifford (age 25) and Howard (age 22) still live at home. The youngest child, Lillian (age 13) is also living there. The household also now has a boarder named Alfred Ireland who is a machinist in a factory.
Herbert’s mother (Frances) is living in Los Angeles, California with Sarah Redford-Tinston and her husband.
August 27, 1921
Herbert‘s mother Frances dies in Los Angeles, California of chronic myocarditis. She was 80 years old. She is buried at the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Cemetery in Los Angeles. Sarah Redford-Tinston is the informant on the record.
1924
Note: Herbert’s wife Sadie possibly died in this year. I don’t know the place, but my current thinking is New Jersey. There is a Sadie Redford buried in Rosedale Cemetery in Orange, New Jersey. Someone took a picture of the grave for me on Find A Grave, but there is nothing on the marker to indicate this is my Sadie. The year does fit for her birth year.
April 1930
Herbert is now widowed and living as a lodger in Los Angeles, California. He is one of nine lodgers in the house of Margaret Clement. All the boarders have various types of jobs and are from lots of different places.
April 1940
Herbert and his sister Lillian Redford-Stemmle are living together at 3469 Siskiyou Street in Los Angeles, California. Lillian is listed as widowed but Herbert is listed as single. The x mark indicates Herbert is the person giving the information. Herbert states that he is a Hatter but has been unemployed for 16 weeks.. He also says he is actively seeking work.
September 11, 1940
Herbert dies in Los Angeles, California at the age of 67. His cause of death was chronic myocardial degeneration due to Coronary Artery Sclerosis. The Informant on his death certificate is his daughter Lillian Redford-Swiggart. (Whom I previously thought went missing.) He was buried at the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Cemetery in Los Angeles and a kind Find a Grave volunteer fulfilled a photo request for me. 🙂
Records to Find:
Records to Order:
The series of posts I will be writing is based on the Genealogy Do-Over Workbook by Thomas MacEntee. I highly recommend it. 🙂
Okay, so the best way to get through things is to just jump right into them. I’ve learned that about myself over the years. Starting on Thursday of last week, I started getting things ready for my Genealogy Go-Over. The first section of the Do-Over/Go-Over is to clear your slate. I know myself, which means I’m going to have some problems keeping my fingers out of the cookie jar. My intention isn’t to start completely over from scratch. What I do want to do is revisit my current family file person by person. One of the big things that I wanted to happen in my Family File Cleanup was I wanted a good sync between my Ancestry.com DNA Family Tree, my computer database and my website database. I don’t want to have one thing in one, and have to use another for something else.
Since I will only be going over what I have, I do want to have access to my old files. I just don’t want to jump in and do 8,000 things at once. To help myself with this, I took all my paper documents which I have in acid-free page protectors and I put them in 3 ring binders that I have here. Eventually, when the time is right, I will be analyzing each of those documents. I will be getting rid of some. Anything that comes from a state repository will be staying (basically that I paid for). To help myself not get lost in the documents, I have made myself an index using Google Sheets. This way, I can easily access the list of paper documents that I have.
I know that I could have spent hours deciding how to index this and what to put on it. That’s just how I am. Instead I went with being short and sweet. I have the focus of the record, the type of document, and whether it is scanned or not. I didn’t allow myself to even check my digital files for scans. If I knew off the top of my head it was scanned, it got a yes, otherwise it got a no. I have separate tabs for each binder. It will be very easy for me to just glance at this and get to what I need to find. The documents are in the order that the list is in, so I shouldn’t have to flip back and forth looking for anything. It’s already saved me a lot of time just when I was doing my Timeline post for William Harmon Mays.
The next big thing that I have to take into account is my digital files. When I went through my previous cleanup, I set up a numbering and organizational system that works for me. I am still trying to decide if I’m going to keep it that way, or re-organize it some other way. I don’t have to think about that yet though. Right now I’m just clearing my slate so I can breathe again. That means I did a thing.
This is the current state of my Genealogy Drive. I’m not going to lie to you, I still panic a bit when I look at it. I tell myself that I can still use my old organization if I want to. That thought is what pushed me into going ahead and moving everything into the Hold Over folder. In fact, I might even move the Hold Over folder to my Media Drive so that I can’t be tempted too much to go wandering in there. The only thing in my Family Files folder is my current working Legacy file. The Office Files only holds one file currently. It’s my new Genealogy Task Tracker.
There will be a few resources I will be using as I go through this process. I will be working through Mastering Genealogical Proof by Thomas Jones before I get back into researching. I will also be trying out Evidentia for the first time during this process. It is a lot, but I think if I take my time and go through it slowly, I will be setting myself up for success in the future.
The last thing I’m going to share today is that I’ve made a new e-mail address just for genealogy! In a perfect world, I would use my moore-mays.org email. However, it’s always been temperamental. So instead I am now using le*************@gm***.com. I had every intention of trying to ditch the leeny part of my e-mail. I thought maybe I should have a more grown-up sounding e-mail once and for all. It was almost impossible to find one that wasn’t already in use and I’m not a fan of adding a million numbers into an e-mail.
So that’s where we stand as of today, I’m still working on the next part of Month 1 in the workbook. I will tell you more about that next Wednesday! 🙂
Other posts in this series:
Source List:
Thomas MacEntee, The Genealogy Do-Over Workbook (Kindle Edition); GeneaBloggers (http://www.geneabloggers.com : downloaded 31 December 2015), Month 1.
Just last week, I wrote about how my thinking has changed over the 13 years I’ve researched my family history. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two weeks watching videos and reading genealogy books. It’s very funny how much my thinking has changed over just the last few weeks. The more I learn, the more I realize that I didn’t have brick walls before but brain walls.
The reason I say brain walls is because what used to seem insurmountable, just isn’t anymore. Things are challenging, or they test my knowledge but never does it feel like I’m stuck. Okay, George Thorward sometimes makes me feel stuck. That’s only because I need to get access to more records or learn more about something. It feels like something finally switched in my head. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m analyzing the data better or because I’m becoming more knowledgeable about how to do things. I don’t have a college educated background in research and things, so I didn’t start with all this knowledge on how to write-up reports or do huge research projects. I’m just trying to learn the best I can. Really that’s all any of us can do I guess.
Have you ever had something just click in your head? I’m sorry for all the rambling posts lately, I am just being very contemplative as I get ready for my Genealogy Do-Over.
Credit: Lightbulb image is a free stock photo.
