Family Newsletter Friday: 7 August 2009

Moore

Good news: I finished transcribing the 196 obituaries plus 3 death certificates from The Greenville News. Bad news: I’m ordering 21 more. But that should just about wrap up that part of my Descendants of Samuel Moore of Greenville County, SC (d. 1828).

Norman

So it’s back to the Norman family, trying to find out where I was when I stopped to work on the Moore and Lewis obituaries. I had to do some backtracking to figure out that I had been working on the family of James Alford Norman (married Tennie Moody), son of J. J. (James Joseph) Norman, son of Joseph Madison Carroll Norman.

The family of JMC Norman is huge, and it is very difficult to keep people straight, especially for those with names that appear so many times – James/Joseph/Jode/J.J./Joel, and so forth, Thomas, Carroll (man’s name), and others.

I’m not sure if there is anyone out there who will be following my Norman research on my blog, whereas I know there are people who occasionally check in on Moore/Floyd/Brinlee research. I am trying to straighten out and compile my list of contacts for the Norman family so that I can send out an e-mail this week. One is a gentleman who contacted me last May. I believe the part of the family tree he has belongs to a cousin by marriage (now deceased) who was active in the Hot Springs, Arkansas genealogical society. His tree contains information on families for two of my great-grandfather William Henry “Jack” Norman’s children by Rebecca Monk – Leatha Norman (m. Thomas Wiley Huff) and Thomas F. Norman – on whom I had no information.

I haven’t had much luck with most of the daughters of J. J. Norman, JMC Norman’s second son by Rebecca Monk, though I do have information on Mary Cordelia and Letha Christian. (The other daughters are Emma, Rebecca, Sallie/Dolley, Ola, and Betsey.)

Someone named Patty has an online genealogy for Leatha Norman (not the daughter of J. J., but the sister of my great-grandfather William Henry Norman – see what I mean?) which contains some information that does not line up with what I (and some other researchers) have, but it does have Leatha married to Thomas Wiley Huff and she has the full name (William Henry “Jack”) for my great-grandfather. Meanwhile, I have sent a note to someone on Ancestry who corrected an 1870 census entry for Thomas Huff, to make sure that these are the right people. They do live near my great-grandfather in the 1900 census for Grayson County, Texas, they are from Alabama, and Leatha is the right age. From the states of birth and ages of their children, it appears that they came to Texas well before my great-grandfather did (1882 compared to 1892-1895 timeframe); that may be why the Jack Norman family came to Grayson County.

Next week I should mostly be working on the families of Jack Norman’s siblings Leatha and Thomas.

Experiences with research resources this week: Accidentally got kicked into New Search on Ancestry. Hated it. Checked out Genealogy Bank to see what resources they have in the areas I am interested in and what kind of hits I would get for certain family names. They mostly do not have newspapers from the counties I am really interested in, with the exception of the Dallas Morning News, and I already subscribed to the Dallas Morning News Archives and downloaded about 700 articles at one point, so I don't know how much more I could find. Wish there were online archives for the Dallas Times Herald. However, I got a lot of tantalizing hits on the Brinlees, so I will probably subscribe at some point. I did a few searches on Google Books and found an interesting mention of my great-great uncle William Henry Lewis (the one who was a sheriff of Dallas County).