The Happy Dance: Getting Hooked on Genealogy, Part 3

"The Happy Dance. The Joy of Genealogy. Almost everyone has experienced it. Tell us about the first time, or the last time, or the best time. What event, what document, what special find has caused you to stand up and cheer, to go crazy with joy?”

I’ve had many occasions to do the genealogy happy dance in the short time I’ve been doing genealogy. They have ranged from quiet triumph to sheer ecstasy and a glow that has lasted over several days. If genealogy is an addiction like drugs, then someone has been passing me the hard stuff.

As the subject of this post I have chosen the first time I did that dance (actually, the first several times – it was an exciting week), and this actually dovetails with Part III of my series of posts on “Getting Hooked on Genealogy.”

Taking my cue from the amount of information I was able to turn up just by googling Brinlees, I tried to see what I could find on the names mentioned in Cousin Eunice’s History of the Floyd Family. By combining key phrases, place name, etc. with personal names, I was able to find quite a lot to extend the known lines into some families that already had been the subject of serious research as well as biographies of some of my ancestors who were Cumberland Presbyterian ministers. This was all extremely interesting and intriguing, but I cannot say that it inspired me to do the Happy Dance. I was simply finding research that had already been done (which is, of course, an important component of genealogical research, but … not as exciting as original research).

But I began to notice something. All of this information was on my mother’s mother’s family. When I looked for information on my mother’s father’s family, there was only one piece of information: a partial name for his father (my great-grandfather) - ? Perrin Moore. His first name was not even known. There was something sad and troubling about this. I realized that I believe that everyone deserves to be remembered and that it bothered me that this was all that was remembered of Perrin Moore.

This was still at the very beginning of my research, when everything I knew about genealogy could be fit into a thimble with room to spare. It would be a year before I subscribed to Ancestry and I didn’t know about Heritage Quest; I was just becoming aware of Rootsweb, GenWeb, and genealogy discussion boards and was still relying mostly on Google.

And Google came through for me again. I don’t remember what the exact combination of terms was, but it led me to a GenWeb site, Jim Wheat’s Dallas County Texas Archives, which contained a transcription of the death certificate for Harlston Perrin Moore, who had died on 12 December 1921 in Lancaster, Dallas County, Texas. My mother’s family had come from this part of Dallas County. There was a rush as the realization hit me: This was “my guy.” And the death certificate provided the names of his parents, Spencer Moore and Emily Tarrant. For the first time, I jumped out of my chair and pumped my fists in triumph.

The euphoria lasted for about a week, during which time ignorance of research resources and techniques kept me at a standstill, but when I finally figured out how to use that little search box on the genealogy discussion boards (Moore may be an awfully common name, but Harlston and Perrin are not), I found two other researchers who were interested in that family. Second Happy Dance! (“Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!”) They had his siblings and the location of the family (South Carolina – suddenly I remembered a long-forgotten statement made by my mother, “Our people are from the Carolinas”), but they did not know his mother’s maiden name. Because I did know, I had something to contribute! I would write to them and … then I noticed that the posts were dated around 2000-2001. Would their e-mail addresses still be any good? With trepidation I wrote to them. I received a reply from my third cousin Jo Ann the next morning – she was as excited as I was – and from Kim, who does research on Anderson County SC families – a few days later. Our exchange of correspondence was fast and furious, and from that point there was no turning back.

Finding Harlston Perrin Moore led to the first Happy Dance, and finding his family and fellow researchers made me realize that the first discovery was not a fluke, that I had only scratched the surface of easily available resources for family research, and that it is possible to use these resources to find out an astounding amount of information on our ancestors. This was the point at which I was well and truly hooked.

(65th edition, Carnival of Genealogy at kinnexions. Poster courtesy of footnote Maven.)

Wordless Wednesday: Grandma Brinlee, Randy, and Bud

This is a picture of Grandma Sallie Brinlee with her grandsons Randy and Bud Rice. They are sitting on the porch of Grandma's farm in Fannin County, Texas. Based on the boys' apparent ages in the picture, I would guess that it was taken in 1954.

Tuesday Tips: Navigating World War I Draft Registration Cards

Although I’m sure I’ll be playing the role of Captain Obvious in pointing out the following, I just noticed something the other night while examining a World War I Draft Registration Card on Ancestry. I have used this Ancestry database quite a bit, but never paid attention to the fact that you can navigate back and forth from card to card on this database just the way you can from one census page to another on the census image databases. After noticing the “back” and “forward” arrows and the fact that there were 800+ images in this particular section of the database, I became curious and used the arrows to see where they would take me. And they took me to other young men with the same last name, in alphabetical order, who lived in the same area (in this case, Greenville County, South Carolina). It was a “Duh!” moment. While I almost always check for these Cards for men in my family tree who were in the proper age range, I never thought of using the family name grouping to find additional family members and make sure I had found all the cards for a family that I could, regardless of how their given and middle names might appear.

Something I have done to make transcribing the cards easier is to have the blank form questions (three forms in all – A, B, and C) in a word document that I can quickly copy into my genealogy program or another document so that only the answers have to be filled in to complete the transcription.

Aunt Joy

Mattie Joy Campbell Moore, 2 August 1914 – 24 December 2008

Last week I received a letter from my Cousin Joan on the death of her mother, Mattie Joy Campbell Moore – my Aunt Joy. We Moore cousins have known for some time that this would not be too far off, as Aunt Joy was 94 years old and getting progressively weaker. But this did not make it easier for us to hear the news.

When my family was going through difficult times, Aunt Joy and Uncle Howard took me into their home, gave me stability, and helped to raise me – providing not only the physical necessities but also a positive influence on essential aspects of character formation. And Aunt Joy was actually responsible for my choice of profession.

I don’t know what inspired her to do it, but somewhere she got the idea of taking me (14 years old at the time) and her 10-year-old grandson Allen, who was staying with us at the time, to see Sergey Bondarchuk’s 1967 movie version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The movie was in Russian with subtitles, about seven hours long and divided into two parts shown a week apart, and it had long battle sequences and intellectual conversations. Allen and I were absolutely entranced by it. We spoke of little else during the week in between the two installments. Would Pierre and Natasha get together? What would happen to Prince Andrey? (Obviously, we had not read the book and did not know the ending.) Soon after this I did read the book, and four years later I went off to study Russian at Georgetown, where I met my husband; and a few years after that I became a translator. Thank you, Aunt Joy.

Aunt Joy was married to my Uncle Howard Moore, my mother’s oldest brother. Uncle Howard was known among local music circles as a highly talented maker of violins (even though he was technically an amateur, as it was not his main profession), and he and Aunt Joy would take me to old-time fiddling festivals and meetings of the Southern California Old-Time Fiddlers’ Association, where they served as officers. That left its mark on me, too – I have an awesome collection of fiddling music from around the world.

Some of the best times I remember with Aunt Joy involved making our favorite dessert, “Boozy Fruit Salad” (fruit, whipped cream, coconut, and a liberal splashing of Amaretto). From her I learned one of the most enjoyable treatments for a really bad cold – a hot toddy.

Aunt Joy was a petite woman, but she could be intimidating and ferocious. She could also laugh uproariously at anything and everything, including herself. She taught me good manners, self-reliance, a little bit of humility, and frugal and industrious habits (or tried to, at any rate). I admit at times I must have seemed a hopeless case. But I couldn’t help but be influenced by her philosophy of life: be strong and don’t let life get you down. This helped her rise to the top professional ranks during years she worked for the telephone company. She was one of those people who was meant to lead.

Lessons Learned Sunday: Keeping Up with Correspondence

The other day I got a wake-up call. It came in the form of an e-mail from a distant cousin inquiring to find out whether I was still working on our common line, the Moores, and also asking for a current e-mail address for another distant cousin. It just so happened that I actually had started back to work on this line and was in the process of completing a compilation of the descendants of our common ancestor. I was working on the last group of these Moores, which consisted of the descendants of this gentleman’s (and the other cousin’s) grandfather. I realized I had really dropped the ball on this project. Not only should I have gotten in touch with these Moore cousins immediately, I should have been keeping in touch. For one thing, they can provide me with information on their lines. For another, the cousin who contacted me had changed addresses (and I had to scramble to find the other cousin’s addresses and figure out which one is still good). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, some of my cousins on this side who have been following this research are elderly, so I cannot take them for granted.

One of my mistakes was to underestimate these cousins’ level of interest in this research (turns out both are very interested). The other mistake, however, was letting my correspondence records fall into disarray. I know there are various systems for keeping track of correspondence and that many professional genealogists have some pretty sophisticated and complete systems. However, I believe that even the keen amateurs should have some sort of correspondence records system. For many researchers corresponding with family members, fellow researchers, experts in relevant fields, providers of services, etc. is a vital component of their research.

Instead of a single correspondence log, I keep separate logs in the front of the binder for each family and subject. This now includes a list of the e-mail address of my correspondents (and sometimes snail-mail address for those with whom I exchange hard copy materials as well as telephone numbers for those people with whom I have occasional “Texas telephone calls”), as well as a list of people that I want to contact at some point (mostly posters on genealogy discussion boards). It also has copies of a lot of my e-mail correspondence with them (sorry to those of you who believe in paperless offices – paranoia born of a long, pathetic history of losing e-mail that exists solely in electronic form has led to this state of affairs). What I need to add to these are copies of some of my own e-mails dealing with research; some of these e-mails, lost in the aforesaid pathetic history, could provide a lot of blog material with very little alteration, and being the lazy person I am, that thought really makes me cry. The other addition that is needed is an actual log of correspondence with dates. I could do this in purely chronological order, but I prefer to have a separate section for each correspondent. This would make it easier to notice when I have not corresponded with someone for a while. While this amount of detail might not be necessary for less-active family lines, I think it is essential for the major areas of research. And finally, make sure that main list of contacts is always fully up-to-date, which may include noting which e-mail addresses no longer work.

I hope to include “Lessons Learned Sunday” as a semi-regular feature on my blog. You will notice that I included my own experience (read: mistakes). That’s the idea. Since I have made so many mistakes in the course of my genealogy research, I figured these mistakes would provide plenty of fodder for blog articles and, I hope, help a few people.

Late Night Genealogy

Is it just me, or does a disproportionate amount of genealogical research get done late at night – maybe not the “wee, small hours of the night,” but at the end of the day, when you’ve put in a day’s worth (or two if you are a stay-at-home mother, work and take classes, etc.) of work and are tired and not at your sharpest? I’m sure there are people who get a significant amount research done during the day; this is probably the case with professional genealogists, but do they end up pushing their own family research back until after they’ve done their clients’ work?

In my case, during the work week, it is a good day when I’ve been able to devote half an hour to research, and that often comes at about 10:00 at night. At 10:30, as my eyelids start to droop and I can tell my brain is getting sluggish, I reluctantly have to stop my research for the day. It occurs to me that the quality of my research, i.e. thoroughness, soundness of conclusions, and so forth, may be suffering. Is that why I have so many strange handwritten notes everywhere that I can’t figure out the next day, let alone several weeks later?

Even on weekends, a good chunk of quality research time can be hard to find. That dust I can see on my bookshelves is calling to me. The cats want to play. My daughter needs a ride. Four hours of solid research feels like an awesome accomplishment.

And I really, really mean to finish this post, but, um, you know … it’s getting late and, um, … zzzz

The Strangest Thing Happened Last Night

Last night when I pulled my blog up on the laptop that I work on downstairs, the format didn't look quite the way it usually does. There was a darkish banner at the top and the words "ob-scene content" appeared. I was mystified. This is my blog: to say the content is innocuous is probably an understatement. Everything seemed slightly off and when I clicked on the list of "Blogs I Follow," the blogs were brought up in feed form, not as the regular blogs. I thought perhaps some sort of mischief must have been involved, so I switched to another browser. Everything seemed to be OK there, and the blog appeared as normal on my main computer in my home office.

The event bothered me all day at work, and I started to think: What was different; what could possibly be construed as obscene? For one thing, I realized that I had not used the laptop since the weekend and I had posted my last article (the one below, "Visiting with Grandma Brinlee") using my regular computer on Monday. I also remembered that the laptop is an old family computer and that the last two "owners" were my two daughters - and we had probably put some sort of screening program on the browser.

The only difference was the article. I am not sure if my conclusion is correct, but I think it is this: I had used a word which can mean "chewing tobacco" but can also mean a terrible type of movie, one which is not appropriate for anyone of any age, let alone children. I changed the wording of the article and am having no problems on either computer. But I am totally paranoid now, and I can empathize with Randy Seaver, who could not access his own blog at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City as described here.

Memory Monday: Visiting with Grandma Brinlee

I must have first “met” my father’s mother, my Grandma Sallie Frances Norman Brinlee, when I was just a baby, since my parents moved back to Texas from Pennsylvania when I was about 10 months old. However, we only stayed in Texas for a few months and then moved out to Southern California to live, and there are only three occasions that I remember visiting with Grandma Brinlee.

The first was a Christmas visit, and that trip to Texas must have been in December 1962. On the way we visited a cousin of Dad’s (Archie?) in New Mexico, followed by a stay with my mother’s sister Irene in Seymour, and then we stopped in the Dallas area to visit my father’s oldest brother, Girdion. From there we made our way to Grandma’s farm, where she lived with another of my Dad’s brothers, Leroy. Uncle Leroy would take me out with him when he went to feed the animals and he let me pet one of the calves. Grandma had two dogs, one of which was supposedly half wolf. The wolf-dog didn’t appear too intimidating, but we nevertheless kept our distance. There was a goat in the yard who liked to butt people who got too close. I wasn’t taking any risks on that score, either.

Grandma’s farm did not have many conveniences; I believe it did have electricity and well water. There was not even an outhouse. There was a stream bed. My mother took this in good humor, but we made a lot of jokes about it.

Grandma made her own butter, which she finished off using a mold (I think) with a daisy-like pattern. She served this with delicious biscuits. We had fresh eggs from Grandma’s chickens.

One of the aspects of the visit I liked most was that I got to help Uncle Leroy cut one of the trees on the farm to use as a Christmas tree. Then we made popcorn and strung it to use as a garland and fashioned other ornaments from chestnuts (or something like them) and the silver paper from cigarette packs (my parents and most of the Brinlees were heavy smokers; I seem to remember we had plenty of these homemade ornaments to put on the tree). Aunt Evangeline also came to visit, and was already suffering from the emphysema that would contribute to her death a couple of years later.

A few years after this trip Grandma flew out to visit us in California; my parents started calling her the “Globe-Trotter.” She came with another lady; I believe this was her sister Mollie. The thing that amazed and fascinated me was that they were both users of chewing tobacco and at most times had a “chaw can” with them. I had not noticed it so much during our trip to Texas, but during this visit it dawned on my that Grandma had a rather abrupt demeanor; she expected obedient behavior and could make some pretty caustic comments of disapproval. Many years later, after both she and my mother had passed on, I found and read some letters she had written to my mother after my father’s death. My parents had divorced before my father died, but these letters to my mother revealed a much more tender side of my grandmother’s personality than I had ever seen. She confided her fears about her poor health and inquired about how I was doing in college. She signed off with “I love you very much.” I believe the grandmother we saw was the stoic woman who had led a hard life, the one who inspired a little fear in her grandchildren, but there was a lot more to her than that. She apparently had an inquiring mind – she had started some family research some years before but, as my father and Uncle Bill noted, “got disgusted with finding so many horse thieves” and such, so had given it up. (Grandma was a Norman, but I haven’t found any Normans so far who fit that bill; however, there were definitely Brinlees – my great-great grandfather and his brother -- who were tried for crimes, but as far as I know they were not tried for stealing horses. They were tried for murder. More on that later.)

The last time I saw Grandma Brinlee was right after my graduation from high school. By this time I was living with my mother in Baylor County, Texas. Early in the morning after the graduation ceremony, my father drove me to Grandma’s farm. Grandma’s graduation present to me was a large, fluffy bath towel. There were several uncles there as well, so the Brinlees spent the day talking. Fortunately for me, Uncle Lewis had brought his son Wayne, who was close to me in age and intellectual interests. We had never met before, but we also spent the day in pleasant conversation. By the end of the day, almost everyone had left; even Grandma got tired and went to bed. Only my Dad and Uncle Windy were left. Uncle Windy had had cancer and appeared to be in fragile health. Still, he and my Dad managed to stretch out their good-byes for at least an hour or two. “I hope you don’t mind too much,” my Dad said. “This may be the last time Windy and I get to see each other.” I was getting a little tired and impatient, but I just nodded. Later I was glad I had not rushed to pull my Dad away. Uncle Windy lived another 20 years, but my father died the following November in an automobile accident.

How many times has each of us wished that we had listened to our relatives’ conversations a little more closely and asked them more questions? I could have asked Grandma about her family research or my Dad and his brothers about their service in the various branches of the armed forces. Only the youngest Brinlee brother, my Uncle Bill, is left. He is like a treasure to me now; I try to get him to tell me as many of his wonderful stories as he can remember when we talk on the phone. My youngest daughter even interviewed him about his service in the Navy for a project for her history class. She is very proud of him. I am hoping that my daughters will be wise enough to treasure what I took for granted.