Finding a New Family and Alice Floyd Ezell Bibb (Repost)

I am way behind in posting on the 52 genealogy blogging prompts provided by Amy of We Tree, but one of the recent prompts (last week's?) that I particularly wanted to respond to had to do with reposting an old article. I am going to combine two articles I posted in October 2008, Finding a New Family and Alice Floyd Ezell Bibb, 26 Jan 1882-17 Oct 1918. Alice's story is a tragic and touching one, and actually would have been ideal for the recent "Disasters" Carnival of Genealogy hosted by Miriam Midkiff Robbins over at Ancestories, because the influenza epidemic of 1918-1920 plays a large role.

Finding a New Family

The “new family” mentioned in the title above does not refer to a set of direct ancestors, i.e., the parents of a “brick wall” ancestor, but is located in a “collateral line,” in this case, the family of one of the brothers of my great-grandfather Charles Augustus Floyd. The brother in question is Caswell B. Floyd, who was born in 1845 in Illinois, married Mary Miller, and died in 1890 in Kleberg, Dallas County, Texas. The Floyds were one of the first families on whom I had any information, thanks to some outstanding Floyd family researchers, Eunice Sandling and the Jim and Pat Dodd family. It often seemed that there was very little I could add by way of research to what they had already done. They already had a family group for Caswell and Mary Floyd, which included five sons – George Albert, William Henry, Joseph Ira, Ollie B., and Charles Alford. However, Caswell ‘s death in 1890 opened up the possibility that there were additional children born between the 1880 census and Caswell’s death in 1890.

The 1900 census showed an Alvin C. Long, born ca 1888, living with a Charles and Mary Long in Precinct 4, Dallas County, Texas, and I suspected that Mary Long was Caswell’s widow. I eventually got in touch with a descendant of Cletus Caswell Floyd, Alvin Cletus Floyd’s son, and the name Caswell and the descendant’s claim that the family was from Kleberg, Texas, made me positive that my guess was correct. However, this still is not the family referred to in this article.

When I did the census work for Charles and Mary Long, I found that in the 1910 census, Mary was shown as having given birth to 10 children, of whom 8 were still living. That meant it should be possible to find eight living children at that point in time, but at this point I knew only of Caswell and Mary’s six sons plus another son, Emmet, born to Mary and Charles Long. Emmet was born in 1893, at which time Mary was already about 45 years old, and in the 1900 census Mary was mistakenly shown as having had only one child, i.e., Emmet, so I guessed that the child not accounted for must have been Caswell’s child. After eliminating Floyd males from the Charles August Floyd and Alfred Byrum Floyd (Charles’ and Caswell’s youngest brother) families, there did not seem to be any additional male Floyds born in the early 1880s living on their own in the Dallas area. That left one possibility, a phenomenon known to many family researchers dealing with this period in history – 1880 to 1900 – who understand that one of the consequences of the loss of almost the entire 1890 census is the “lost daughter” phenomenon – a daughter born in the early 1880s (so she does not appear on the 1880 census) who by 1900 has already married and no longer lives with her family (so she cannot be found under her maiden name in the 1900 census).

My next step was to look for a young (less than 20 years old) married woman in the Kleberg area. There were several candidates, and for at least two of these it was indicated that one or both parents had been born in Illinois (the only reliable “distinguishing feature” I could use to narrow down the field), but I was actually able to find their maiden names with a little hunting, and none of them was the missing daughter. That was several months ago. About a week ago I was taking care of one of the more mundane genealogy chores, recopying quickly scribbled notes to put in the proper family binders. Probably about a year or so earlier (before I was very familiar with the Caswell Floyd family), I had hastily jotted down some information from Jim Wheat’s Dallas County Texas Archives (another plug for one of my favorite websites) – the transcript of the death certificate for a young woman named Alice Bibb who had died in the great influenza epidemic in 1918. Listed as her parents were C. B. Floyd and Mary Mills. At the time it piqued my curiosity, but I was not familiar enough with the family to be certain that this was Caswell and Mary. Seeing my notes a second time, however, gave me that jolt and then the rush familiar to so many genealogy buffs – this was the daughter I had been searching for! This was followed by embarrassment at my “senior moment” – forgetting that I had already “found” the daughter. I then remembered that her death fell within the right time frame to be covered by the Texas death certificates on the Family Search pilot site (another favorite website). A glance at the image of the original death certificate showed that Mary Mills was indeed actually Mary Miller, and Alice Bibb was Alice Floyd, the missing daughter.

Alice Floyd Ezell Bibb, 26 Jan 1882-17 Oct 1918

One of the first things I learned about Alice Floyd Bibb was that she died of influenza and pneumonia on 17 October 1918. The date in itself is eloquent - these were the early days of the Great Influenza Epidemic. Now the task that confronted me was to work backward from her death and find out whom she had married, what children she had, if any, and everything else I could find out about her life. I started with her death certificate. Originally I had a transcription, but now I could get an image at the Family Search pilot site. Alice died in Kleberg, Dallas County, Texas. This was the area where members of the Caswell Floyd family lived. The other two brothers who survived Caswell, Charles Augustus and Alfred Byrum, had lived in the Hutchins/Lancaster area of Dallas County. The informant on her death certificate was Ira Floyd, her brother. The undertaker who signed the certificate was E. O. Prewitt, the husband of Alice's niece Cheba Floyd. Cheba herself would die within four years after complications from an operation. The registrar who signed the document was W. S. Skiles, a distant relative by marriage through Charles Floyd's wife Angeline Matlock Floyd.

My next step was to find out precisely who Mr. Bibb was; at this point I assumed that he was the man that Alice had married by the 1900 census, making her an "invisible" Floyd. A simple search did not reveal the couple on the 1910 census, so I took another piece of information from the death certificate, Lee Cemetery, to see if I could find someone there. Through a bit of googling, I found a site which listed a number of graves in Lee Cemetery and even had pictures of the tombstones. One of the tombstones was for a T. H. Bibb, 1868-1818. This looked promising. I could find no Bibb family with that spelling in the Dallas area on the 1900 or 1910 census, but the 1880 census for nearby Kaufman, Texas showed a widower named Thomas H. Bibb with his children, and the oldest child was also named Thomas, age 12. The younger Thomas must be the T.H. Bibb in Lee Cemetery (and the older Thomas Bibb is also buried in Lee Cemetery), but was he also Alice's husband? With a little creativity I found a Tom Bib on the 1900 census, born November 1868, with his wife Nancy, born February 1877, and daughters Lora and Mabel. It appeared that he was not Alice's husband. However, I went back to the Lee Cemetery records, and the 1918 date of death for Tom was very suggestive. Then I found an important piece of information - one of the other Bibbs In Lee Cemetery was a Nancy Bibb, born 1873 and died in 1904. It struck me that perhaps Alice was Tom's second wife and, given no Alice Floyd on the 1900 census, Tom may very well have been Alice's second husband.

To find this couple (I hoped) on the 1910 census, I decided to work on finding Lora or Mabel, without the last name. That worked - this time the family members were listed as Thomas and Allice Bibbs, Thomas' daughters Lora and Mabel, and, what gave me the final clue I needed to find Alice with her first husband on the 1900 census, listed as Thomas' stepson (therefore Alice's son from her first marriage), James Ezell. Looking for an Ezell family on the 1900 census in Dallas County was fairly straightforward and produced Tom Ezell, wife Allice, and son Oran T. James Ezell was born after 1900, so Oran must have died by 1910. Oran's death, the early deaths of Tom Ezell and Nancy Woody Bibb, and Alice's early death were the first chapters I found in the tragedy-marked life of this family. I returned to Lee Cemetery to find out how the other Bibbs were related, and quickly found two daughters who died quite young, Elizabeth (1912-1913) and Frances (1913-1914). Their death certificates, which were also online, showed that they were Thomas and Alice's children and showed that Elizabeth had died of bronchial pneumonia and Frances of dysentery. Thomas Bibb's death certificate confirmed what his tombstone hinted at, that he had died in the influenza epidemic, and in fact showed that he died on the very same day as Alice.

A search on Ancestry turned up a third daughter of Thomas Bibb and Alice Floyd, but no name was given. Further census work showed that she survived (her name was Billie) and was brought up by Lora Bibb who, at the young age of 22, had been the informant on her father's death certificate. The 1920 census with Lora and Billie shows them with Lora's husband Arthur Glenn and their son Martin. The 1930 census shows Lora as a widow, a younger son Phillip K. Glenn, and Billie. At first I thought this was the continuation of the numerous tragedies suffered by this family, but Ancestry searches for Arthur and Martin to find death dates led me to believe that the tragedy that befell this family may have been one of separation, not death. I found evidence that a Charles Arthur Glenn from the same area of Dallas County as the Caswell Floyd family was the "right" Arthur Glenn, and this Arthur Glenn, his son Martin (both of the right ages), a new wife Anna, and Anna's daughters Lorean and Caroline Ray living in Cameron County, Texas on the 1930 census. Arthur's stepdaughters were of the right age for him to have still been married to Lora when youngest son Phillip was born. The interesting thing was that each parent had taken a son.

Lora Bibb Glenn did not completely escape further tragedy, however. On 30 June 1951, her younger son Phillip Keith Glenn died at age 26 in a prison camp in Korea. The following information is provided for him in the Korean War Casualty listings:

"First Lieutenant Glenn was a member of the 2nd Engineer Combat Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division. He was taken Prisoner of War while fighting the enemy near Kunu-ri, North Korea on November 30, 1950 and died while a prisoner on June 30, 1951. First Lieutenant Glenn was awarded the Prisoner of War Medal, the Korean Service Medal, the United Nations Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal and the Korean War Service Medal." I believe that he may have married a woman named Millie Etta Reed and had a daughter named Donna; perhaps this was some consolation to his mother. I believe Arthur Glenn died 23 July 1943, but I do not know what happened to Martin Glenn. Lora Bibb died on 22 March 1969; the informant on her death certificate was Billie (Bibb) Kay, her younger half-sister.

The other Bibb sister, Mabel Bibb, died at age 37 on 8 December 1934, about three weeks after the birth of her seventh child, Nancy Mabel Walton, apparently from an infection that set in after the birth.

I have not been able to find out anything further about James Ezell.

14 of my 16 Great-Greats

The latest Saturday Night Genealogy Fun from Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings:

1) List your 16 great-great-grandparents in pedigree chart order. List their birth and death years and places.

2) Figure out the dominant ethnicity or nationality of each of them.

3) Calculate your ancestral ethnicity or nationality by adding them up for the 16 - 6.25% for each (obviously, this is approximate).

4) If you don't know all 16 of your great-great-grandparents, then do it for the last full generation you have.

5) Write your own blog post, or make a comment on Facebook or in this post.

1. Hiram Carroll Brinlee Sr.
b. 25 Dec 1808, Kentucky or Tennessee (I have death dates somewhere for Hiram and his wife, but have not yet entered them in my genealogy program because they will be the last set of great-great-grandparents I will be working on until and unless I learn who my Smith great-great-grandparents were).

2. Elizabeth Ann McKinney, b. 23 Feb 1823, Kentucky

3 and 4. The parents of my great brick wall, Susan Elizabeth Smith, whoever they were.

5. Joseph Madison Carroll Norman, b. 8 Jun 1833, Alabama, d. 1 Apr 1901, Arkansas

6. Rebecca Monk, b. 1837, Alabama, d. bef 1864 Alabama

7. William T. Sisson, b. ca 1826, Georgia, d. 12 Feb 1894, Alabama

8. Jerusha Elizabeth Neeley, d. bef 1858

9. William Spencer Moore, b. 1813, South Carolina, d. 31 Oct 1871, South Carolina

10. Emily Tarrant, b. 1813, South Carolina, d. bef 1880, South Carolina

11. Elisha Berry Lewis, b. 1813, South Carolina, d. 23 Feb 1889, South Carolina

12. Martha Poole, b. 1815, South Carolina, d. bef 1865, South Carolina

13. George Floyd, b. 29 Sep 1807, Vermont, d. 11 Mar 1880, Texas

14. Nancy Finley, b. ca 1816, Illinois, d. 5 Feb 1864, Texas

15. Absalom C. Matlock, b. 21 Mar 1825, Kentucky, d. 1865, Texas

16. Nancy Malvina Harris, b. b. 28 Apr 1827, Kentucky, d. 11 Aug 1862, Texas

I cannot give the precise ethnic breakdown for these ancestors; for the most part it is a combination of Scots-Irish and English, with some Welsh (Lewis and Floyd), a bit of German and Dutch through the McKinneys, and possibly a bit of French through the Normans.

Please Keep These Things: Mom’s and Grandma’s Jewelry

The word prompt for the 16th Edition of Smile For The Camera (hosted by Shades of the Departed) is "Bling, ancestor Bling." I am always drawn to the beautiful jewelry worn by our ancestors in old photographs. The locket that was your Great Grandmother's treasure, the pocket watch proudly displayed by a male ancestor, the beautiful crosses of old, and the children with their tiny bracelets. While not many of our ancestors were wealthy enough to own multiple pieces of jewelry, there was the one good piece that held sentimental value. Some of us have been fortunate enough to inherit those treasures. Show us a photograph of your ancestor wearing their "Bling," or photographs of the pieces you have inherited. Admission is free with every photograph!

This edition of “Please Keep These Things” is devoted to the items of jewelry that I have inherited from my mother and grandmother. There are not many, because when my mother died I picked out the pieces of jewelry that I remembered from my childhood and gave the rest of my mother’s jewelry to my Aunt Rene (who did not ask for them but did graciously accept them from me) because she had helped my mother so much through the years. My mother gave the two rings she inherited from my grandmother to me several years before she died.


This “Whispering Leaves” earring and bracelet set was my mother’s favorite set of costume jewelry.



I am pretty sure the jewelry that Mom was wearing in this picture is the Whispering Leaves set. It was taken in Palo Alto, California. We were packing up and getting ready to move up to Renton, Washington to join my father and decided to play Fashion Show. Pierre thought he should be in the show, too, since he was so handsome and photogenic.





Here are the other two pictures I have from our Fashion Show. I do not know what happened to the pearl set in the top picture or the gold chain that can be faintly seen in the bottom picture; they may have been lost in one of our many moves or may have been among the jewelry I gave to Aunt Rene.



This was my mother’s watch; she had this watch when I was a little girl and it is the only watch I remember her having.





These are the two rings my mother inherited from her mother. They are both supposedly emerald rings, but since I have not had them examined, yet, I cannot vouch for that. The one at the top is missing a stone, and the one at the bottom has one stone that is not the same size as the others – I am pretty certain that the smaller stone is original and the two larger ones are replacements. I used to wear the ring, anyway, and that is why there is yarn on it.

Grandma Eula did not collect many possessions, but she did like pretty jewelry, so that is what her children often gave her for Christmas and for her birthday.



This was my mother’s wedding ring set from her marriage to my father.



This was a pin that I picked out to give my mother for Christmas when I was about 8 years old. It is rather gaudy, which I guess reflects an 8-year-old’s taste. My mother always told me how beautiful she thought it was.

To my daughters: I am not sure what instructions I should give to you on keeping or disposing of my own jewelry. I will try to photograph and catalog all items that are especially important to me. If you remember giving it to me, or persuading me to buy it, or you know that your father bought it for me, it is important to me, so please keep it.

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).

Featured Family Friday: Franklin Blakely and Susan Amanda Moore Family

Franklin Blakely
d. bef 1860
& Susan Amanda Moore
b. 14 Feb 1832, Georgia
d. 9 Apr 1923
m. 2 Oct 1851
|--James Moore Blakely
|----b. 31 May 1855, Alabama
|----d. 19 Apr 1943, Piedmont, Grove, Greenville, South Carolina
|--& Sarah Richardson
|----b. 6 Oct 1853, South Carolina
|----d. 17 Sep 1937, Grove, Greenville, South Carolina
|----m. 1876
|--Mariah Blakely
|----b. 1857, Alabama

Susan Amanda Moore was the fourth child of Bud Mathis Moore and Martha Brown Coulter. The “mystery” family members here are her husband, Franklin Blakely, and her daughter, Mariah Blakely. Franklin is mentioned in the Furman Moore history of the Bud Mathis Moore family, but no other information is provided for him, probably because he died so early. On the 1860 census Susan is shown living with her widowed mother, Martha Brown Coulter Moore, her sister Sarah Ann, brother William Spencer, and her two children (the right ages, but the names don’t match). So far I have not found Mariah on the 1880 census but will try again and also try to find her in the marriage records for Greenville County. Franklin and Susan must have lived in Alabama for a while in the 1850s since both children were born there, so there may be some additional records there.

Wordless Wednesday: Angeline Elizabeth Matlock Floyd

My great-grandmother Angeline Elizabeth Matlock Floyd, 1847-1916

Memory Monday: Going to Texas

The first time I went to Texas was when I was a baby and my father, who was in the Air Force at the time, was transferred there from Pennsylvania. We lived there for about a year before he was transferred to Norton Air Force Base in California.

The second time we went to Texas was for Christmas in the early 1960s to visit Grandma Brinlee on her farm (Visiting with Grandma Brinlee); I was about 7 or 8 years old.

The third time we – that is, my mother and I – moved there. I was 15 years old and had just completed the 9th grade at a junior high school in Wilmington, California, where I had been living for the second time with my Uncle Howard and Aunt Joy Moore. The first time I had lived with them was the summer after 7th grade, when my mother’s brothers and sisters in Southern California decided that it would be best for me to stay with one of their families while my parents sorted out their problems.

I agreed. My three junior high school hears were no picnic. Financial problems compelled us to move several times, so that I ended up attending five different junior high schools. The only one that I attended for a full year, and the only one I remember the name of, was Curtis Junior High School in San Bernardino. I had friends there and have fond memories of most of my teachers: Mr. (Morgan) O’Dell (social studies), Mr. Christofferson (science), Mr. (Christopher) Maple (math), and Miss Booth (art).

The next junior high school was somewhere near my relatives (mom and I were living in an apartment), so it could have been in Compton, Torrance, or Wilmington. Classes were divided up into ability-based “lanes” and I like that; I also liked French class, my first real language class. Midway through the year, however, Mom and I moved up to Palo Alto, where Dad was working. We lived in a small house with a yard filled with rosebushes near the Stanford University campus. The school I attended there for the second half of 8th grade, which included many students whose parents worked for the University, was also divided into lanes and the gifted lane was fabulous, providing the equivalent of a private school or magnet school education. French class was much farther along, so I had to catch up, but it was worth it. The physical facility was also outstanding and included a pool for the swimming section of P.E. That pool was where I arrived at the humbling realization that I would never be able to master the crawl, but at least there was the folk dancing section of P.E. to take comfort in.

Unfortunately, by the next fall, my family and I had moved again, up to Renton, Washington, where our rented house was far less picturesque than the previous one. There was a lot of rain and the skies were overcast more often than not. My new junior high school focused on quantity of homework rather than stimulating content of classes. There were no language classes. We had to take Home Ec., where I baked a passable cherry pie and French bread and sewed a somewhat less successful gym bag and A-line skirt. My favorite hangout was the local library, which was partially perched over a fast-moving stream that could be seen through a transparent portion of either the floor in the library or the area right around the library, I can’t remember which.

Two or three months into the school year, I was on a plane headed back to Southern California to live with my aunt and uncle again. It was a relief to return to the stability and comfort of Uncle Howard and Aunt Joy’s house, although the school I attended there was not so outstanding. Even so, I had a couple of friends, was learning some homemaking skills from Aunt Joy, and taking violin lessons. Meanwhile, my father had gone back to Texas to find construction work near his family home, and he was soon joined by my mother. After what turned out to be their final split, my mother moved back to her home town in Texas and into the upstairs apartment of my Aunt Rene’s house. In June I learned that I was to join her there shortly.

I didn’t want to go. Stability was better than constant movement and I was tired of moving and having to catch up every time we moved. However, I felt it would be “mooching” to ask to stay, so I went.

I took the plane to Dallas and may have caught the connector to Wichita Falls. The farther out from the city we drove, the more desolate the scenery became. I was accustomed to the desert landscape of Southern California, but the scrubbiness of the vegetation in North Texas and the hardscrabble life written on the faces of both abandoned and still lived-in buildings along our route had an unsettling effect, a feeling that we had moved backwards in time and jumped across some invisible boundary that divided two different cultures.

The biggest bugs I had ever seen scuttled across the hot highway and flipped up onto our windshield, and at one point I remember passing by an abandoned café and seeing a gigantic tarantula clinging to the outside of one of its dark and broken windows. My heart sank.

I assumed that this move would be like the others, of short duration, not even long enough for me to make it beyond the fish-out-of-water phase, and I accepted the move the way an obedient, dispirited child accepts a dose of bitter medicine.

Those three years in Texas were some of the best medicine I ever took.

SNGF: Genealogical Threes

Three words: Fun, fun, fun! The latest Saturday Night Genealogy Fun proposed by Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings involves a little bit of stock-taking and a little bit of daydreaming.

1) Tell us your three responses to the questions:
2) Post your responses as comments to this blog post, in your own blog, or in a Facebook comment.

* Three genealogical libraries I frequent:
1. McLean Family History Center, McLean, Virginia
2. Fairfax County Library Main Branch in Fairfax City, Virginia (excellent genealogy resources, both local and regional, long history of working with Fairfax Genealogical Society, of which some employees are members)
3. Library of Congress (OK, so I’ve only been there a couple of times)

* Three places I've visited on genealogy trips:
None. I have visited several local repositories with my genealogical society, but have not yet made any road trips to do research, although I desperately want to (South Carolina, Texas, and Illinois probably being my first three choices for road trips). These trips will take time and money and my kids are still at a stage where I don’t have enough of either, yet.

* Three genealogy societies I belong to (or want to):
1. Fairfax Genealogical Society
2. National Genealogical Society (want to)
3. Collin County Texas Genealogical Society (want to - hard to choose among the local ones, but this one has fabulous resources, works closely with the local library, and has helped me with research in return for modest contributions to the library)

* Three websites that help my research
(Another difficult one to narrow down to three):
1. Ancestry.com
2. Family Search Record Search
3. Greenville County SC Historical Records Search (so close on this one with Greenville County Library System and South Carolina Department of Archives and History)

* Three ancestral graves that I've visited:
None. See excuse for “genealogy trips.”

* Three ancestral places I want to visit:
1. The Upcountry of South Carolina
2. Four corners area of Texas (Collin, Fannin, Grayson, and Hunt counties, and oh, Dallas is right next to them)
3. Greene and Jersey counties in Illinois (I’m counting this as one because my ancestors were actually in the Jersey County part but it was Greene County when they lived there)

* Three brickwall ancestors I want to research more:
1. Susan Elizabeth Smith Bonner Brinlee
2. Samuel Moore of Greenville County, South Carolina, d. 1828
3. John T. Brindley of Kentucky, d. 1823 in Caldwell County – probably the father of Hiram and George Brinlee, the brothers from whom all known Brinlees are descended.

Thanks, Randy!