Year: 2024

Word of the Day: Avoidance

Posted on by Kathleen

Definition: The action of keeping away from or not doing something

Well, that definitely describes me. Not only for today, but also for a long time when it comes to the Johnson line of my family tree. I actually need to be more specific, because I have a Johnson line on both my Mom and Dad’s side. Right now I’m talking about my Dad’s side.

The Johnson family on my paternal side.

Definitely looking a little... sparse.

Mary E. Johnson married my 2nd great grandfather, Robert James Moore. This is all I know about her side of the family. I’m feeling pretty guilty that I haven’t been able to figure out more about her. I don’t even have a confirmed death date for her. Which I will explain in another post… after I look back to see if I’ve talked about it already, lol.  Right now I want to focus on her family a little more.

Here’s the records I have from her family:

  • 1865 New York State Census – Islip, Suffolk County, New York
  • 1870 United States Census – Huntington, Suffolk County, New York
  • 1870 Suffolk County Deed – Ann Johnson, wife of Arthur Johnson buying a parcel of land from Alexander S. Brown. Who the family lived next to in the 1870 Census.
  • 1880 United States Census – Babylon, Suffolk County, New York
  • 1881 The Brooklyn Eagle news article – Mentioning Arthur Johnson of Babylon has lost his wife and 2 children within a fortnight.
  • 1882 Suffolk County Deed – Arthur Johnson’s land is mentioned as adjoining land being sold by Stephen Wright to Charles Hallock
  • 1884 New York State Death Index – Arthur Johnson died in Babylon (have not ordered this yet)
  • 1888 map of Babylon – Showing Johnson in between Wright and Hallock properties, matching what I know from land records.
  • 1896 Marriage Record for Mary E. Johnson to Robert James Moore. Listing her parents as Arthur Johnson and Ann Moffott.
  • 1899 Birth Certificate of Mary Florence Moore, confirming that Mary Johnson was born in Babylon, Long Island, New York.

That’s it. That’s everything. For having so many siblings I really think I should have more information on this family. The New York death records are notoriously a long wait time. I’m on year 2 for another one. I think I will have to get the process started for that 1884 one though. I kept holding out hope the wait time might lesson over time, it has not. 

1888 map of Babylon, found online at the New York Public Library.

Next Steps

Currently, I’m just cleaning up and become reacquainted with my computer files. I took quite a bit of a break and now it’s all unfamiliar to me. In the long run this will probably be a good thing because I’m coming at it with fresh eyes. Right now it feels a little overwhelming because I don’t have a lot to go on at all. 

  • Create a detailed timeline for the family, infer what I can from each record. 
  • Order the Arthur Johnson death record to see if I can confirm it’s my Arthur and maybe get a clue about one of the other children.
  • See if I can find Arthur’s wife and two children in the death index in 1881 to see if I can get any additional information there. Death certificates for NY state are $22 so this will be a staggered process.

New Views

Posted on by Kathleen

Well, this is a little different then I imagined. If you’ve found me on the new URL before I’ve announced the change, Welcome! 

To make a long story short, things got complicated. 😂 This may be a temporary change or it might be permanent.  Either way, I’m going to work on organizing things behind the scenes for awhile here.

Identifying Locations

Posted on by Kathleen

Last time I posted, I mentioned I’m working on identifying some slides left to me by my Grandpa Moore. I’m going to share some of my identifications today. This has been a challenge for but also very fun. The challenge being that most of these slides are from the 1960s and not all of these locations exist anymore or look even close to the same. I’ll share how I identified them as I go.

1. Ca’ d’Zan

Photo 1. Llewellyn Thorward-Moore at Ca’ d’Zan in Sarasota, Florida, 1962. Photo 2. From the Ca’ d’Zan website, photo credit to their website.
The first photo is of my Great-Grandma, Llewellyn Thorward-Moore at Ca’ d’Zan in Sarasota, Florida. From my inspections of the slides, they are seem to be taken around 1962. Though I can’t be sure if this was separate trips. This image has fascinated me because of the architecture since the first time I viewed the slides. I initially thought it would be the hardest to identify and it turned out to be the first one. I used a Google Reverse Image search and there it was.

As for why William and Llewellyn visited this place, it’s actually not at all surprising and you will notice this as we progress in this series. They loved botanical gardens. When I say loved. I mean LOVED. Lots and lots of flowers. 😂 There are some more pictures they took from this location I’d love to share.

1st image from 1962 time frame. 2nd image from Google Street View. Image Credit to Google

The Pink Church as I called it for many years was another that I always loved for it’s uniqueness. This also only required a Google Reverse Image Search to find. I don’t think results came right up. I believe it was a historical post card that got me to the right church. That’s an interesting part of reverse image search. While looking at the results, you think oh it must have come right up, but that’s not the case at all a lot of the time. Many times you have to wade through many similar looking images before you find the correct one.

That’s all for now

I have more to share in future posts. While we go along on this adventure. Lets map where we’ve been and keep track.

Still here

Posted on by Kathleen
Llewellyn Thorward-Moore standing in front of flowers.
Llewellyn Thorward-Moore, standing in front of flowers. Unknown location. Unknown time, but definitely a time before the internet.

Well, I’m still here, trying to get back into my genealogy research. I’m also dealing with quite a bit of internet downtime. So the frustration level is high. Then I remind myself, there are things you can do while the internet is down.

Internet Free Tasks to Organize my Genealogy

  1. Organize computer files.
  2. Write blog posts, research logs, notes offline.
  3. Read. I’ve amassed quite a few books over the years and they don’t all live on my Kindle. Which yes, I forgot to download all my books to my Kindle before the internet outage… again. 😂

What I’ve Been Up to Lately (Not all can be done without the internet, hence the frustration.)

  1. I’ve been re-entering my genealogy into a new, clean file. Yes just like my Genealogy Do-Over from years ago. Seems things got a little messy during my hiatus. For those who weren’t around then, the Genealogy Do-Over was created by Thomas MacEntee as a guide to restarting your genealogy research and doing it the right way!
  2. Trying to re-organize and fix my website.
  3. Watching a ton of webinars
  4. Identifying places from slides left behind by my Grandpa Moore and his parents. This is probably the next blog post. 🤔

Also. SPAM is still an issue. Not on the blog, I’ve gone ahead and paid for anti-spam there but my database site is being targeted now. Which is frustrating because it’s the part of the site that people most ask me to bring back. It’s been the best way of me sharing the family tree with my family. The great thing is its not spam visible on the website and my Gmail is catching them all and sending them to a spam filter, but I still need to check each one to be sure there are no false positives.

Fun Fact: This post was written offline, so I could only rely on pictures I already have and my own brain to write it. So this is by no means a comprehensive list of offline activities to help your genealogy. Just what I’m telling myself to do while it is down.

If anyone has any ideas of other things I can do while my internet is down or how to deal with the spam. I’m happy to have suggestions. 😂