Greta's Genealogy Bog

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Wordless Wednesday: Baskets

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: A Prolific Dad

Surname Saturday: Enoch R. Fuller and Martha Rebecca Norman Family

Enoch R. Fuller
b. Mar 1859, Arkansas
d. bef 1920
& Martha Rebecca Norman
b. 21 Sep 1871, Alabama
d. 18 Jun 1962, Albuquerque, New Mexico
m. 6 Feb 1887, Pineland, Pike Co., Arkansas
|--Manuel Fuller
|----b. Feb 1888, Arkansas
|----d. 24 Apr 1926, Wichita, Texas
|---& Lorena Talton
|----b. ca 1890, Lousiana
|--Dallas Demeld Fuller*
|----b. 11 Jun 1900, Arkansas
|----d. 6 May 1955
|---& Cecilia Cooper
|--Dallas Demeld Fuller*
|----b. 11 Jun 1900, Arkansas
|----d. 6 May 1955
|---& Annie
|----b. ca 1898, Texas
|----m. ca 1924
|--Hattie Pearl Fuller
|----b. 11 Sep 1903, Hill Co., Texas
|----d. Dec 1975, Albuquerque, Bernalilo, New Mexico
|---& Henry Russell Robertson

This is the family of Martha Rebecca Norman, half-sister of my great-grandfather William Henry Norman. She was the daughter of Joseph Madison Carroll Norman and Mary Patterson. Since Enoch and Martha Rebecca married in 1887 and Enoch died after 1910 (but before 1920), I am guessing that they may have had a number of additional children who died young.

I would love to share information with anyone related to/researching this family; you can contact me at my e-mail address, which can be found by going to my profile page (there is a link to that page in the About Me section to the left).

Friday, June 18, 2010

Family and Friends Newsletter Friday 18 June 2010

Since we spent last weekend taking B to Middlebury, time and energy have been a bit short this week. I did not do any real research, but I did play around a bit with Ancestry Public Member Trees and did do some “cousin correspondence.” This may be a full genealogy year, after all!

Norman

I was contacted by a Norman-connected cousin, who had apparently seen my posts on the Norman family on this blog. Add another hurrah! for blogging as a way to get in touch with other researchers. We talked about our connections and he was familiar with Normans who had moved to Baylor County. One of his cousins in Garland County does genealogy research, and I have seen her name connected with a lot of Norman family research. Maybe someday I can visit Arkansas….

Moore

It appears that a research trip to Greenville, South Carolina may be in my near future (maybe September?)! More on this later.

Brinlee and Smith

I have not yet gotten started on my next round of Brinlee research, but I mean to start soon. I also have to do some additional “brick wall” work on Susan Elizabeth Smith (Brinlee) before the Knoxville conference. And finally, I’d like to take a look into the Tennessee line with whom a DNA connection has been found to exist for our Brinlees.

Ancestry Public Member Trees and Footnote

As I mentioned in the article below, I have started to put up a little bit of information in a couple of trees I started on Ancestry. I’ll probably go ahead and add information on my father’s family tree, but I may not do as much on my mother’s side as yet. I’m very curious to see who, if anyone, contacts me based on these trees. I’ll probably go ahead and contact some of the people who have some of “my people” in their trees. I should also do some more work on my pages on Footnote and perhaps add a couple of pages, since that seems to have turned up a major contact for me.

Follow Friday 18 June 2010

This week

Another rather abbreviated week; I think I got caught up on my blog reading after our trip to Middlebury, but probably missed some good things.

This week there have been many excellent posts on the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree; “Jamboree: Day 1 & Early Morning of Day 2” by Elyse Doerflinger of Elyse’s Genealogy Blog was especially touching. Congratulations, Elyse! Wish I could have been there to meet you and the other GeneaBloggers.

Renate at Into the Light has just completed her three-part series on “My Grandmother’s Loss”:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
It’s a wonderful series with many touching twists.

Another great Hero story from hummer at Branching Out Through the Years – “The Hero and Two Gun Pete” (this one is a real “laugh out loud” story).

A thoughtful and funny post on how we feel about our ancestors, “It Doesn’t Matter,” from Caroline Pointer at Family Stories.

Read about an experience that must be familiar to most of us in “Mistakes are the portals of discovery” by Leah Kleylein at Random Notes. Humorous, educational, and oh-so-familiar!

Good news about Tennessee newspapers going online in Chronicling America project – covered at Taneya’s Genealogy Blog in “Historic Tennessee Newspapers Going Sigital & Online!” And Taneya is going to be a member of the Advisory Board - congratulations!

Daniel Hubbard’s post “A Memory Trip Down Any Lane” at Personal Past Meditations: A Genealogical Blog examines a fascinating resource: Sanborn insurance maps.

This week I started following these blogs:

Ancestor Seekers by the Root Bound

Arkansas Genealogical Events

Family History Research Tips

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Ancestry’s Public Member Trees: An Addictive New Game

All over America, Facebook users are eagerly racking up points on Farmville, Mafia Wars, and other games. I know; I see them on my Facebook page.

But not me. I don’t dare. Knowing how little time I have for research, blogging, and other pursuits as it is, I avoid these addictive pastimes. Because I would get addicted.

Until now. You see, I thought I’d give Ancestry’s Public Member Trees (PMTs) a whirl. You know, just to see what all the fuss over “shaky leaves” is about.

Little did I suspect. I was just going to input a few names, places, and dates and see what happened; if I liked what I saw, then I might gradually – very gradually – add information.

I started two family trees, one each for my mother and father. The shaky leaves started to appear. Nothing exciting at first, just interesting. These were my closest relatives, the people who had been added to my genealogy program first, and I knew most of them well (parents and grandparents, a couple of aunts and uncles), so at first I hadn’t always bothered to put a source (shame!). To rectify this, I checked out the hints and added sources – SSDI, census, maybe a World War I Draft Registration Card or two. All the sources were familiar to me; I had already transcribed them, even if I hadn’t bothered to cite them for each and every close relative.

As I progressed to aunts, uncles, and their spouses, I had already put source citations, and I started to note that I had more than Ancestry did. “Humph!” I thought. “I’ve got more than you do.” “You” being Ancestry. After going through the sources, I decided to see which PMTs were listed in the hints and what they had. For my father’s close family, there was only one such tree, and the second cousin in question had received the information from me.

Three trees came up for my mother’s immediate family: one first cousin once removed, one first cousin twice removed, and a large group tree for my mother’s home county in Texas. I had much more information and many more sources. “Heh!” I muttered. “I’m ahead here, too.”

For a total of about a dozen relatives, Ancestry’s accuracy was pretty decent on the source hints – out of about 20 hints, only one census link was for the wrong Moore. (This made me think: I often examine the links to the PMTs to the right of the images of the censuses and other documents and I’ve seen incorrect or conflicting connections to a few – are these wrong connections made by the owners of the trees or have they simply accepted incorrect hints from Ancestry?)

For the PMT hints, however, I was not about to hit “Connect”; as I understand it, this is how you add the highlighted information to your own family tree and not how you get in touch with the owner of the tree. If I find anything, I will type it in myself. (A confession: in this process I have found one or two incorrectly entered dates in my genealogy program, such as a 25 Jan 1909 for a 26 Jan 1909; at least I think I made a typo….) But I don’t want to incorporate information without truly looking at it and thinking about it, and I don’t want to have to go back to correct sloppy capitalization and punctuation (which seem to be all over the place in these trees).

And the fact that anybody can just hit “Connect” and endlessly duplicate mistakes – whether minor or major – bothers me. As I saw the same information appearing in exactly the same form in tree after tree, it occurred to me that you cannot tell who originally contributed the information or who copied from whom (although that information is provided for photos that are downloaded and added to other PMTs). So how do I know whom I should contact? And once I put “new” information up, later, after it has been copied and recopied umpteen times, how is another researcher to know to get in touch with me and not just someone who clicked on “Connect”?

This could have put a damper on any further additions to my trees, but I had learned something else: it is interesting and it is fun to see what comes up; what does Ancestry have and what do other tree owners have? And this brought another question to mind: how far can someone go in building a tree by simply following hints (after a bit of initial data input, of course) and without doing much if any research on their own?

And what new things are added after I have reviewed the old hints? Already I could see that I had more ammunition in the bag: I started fumbling around, trying to use the clunky forms to add some non-Ancestry sources and I was also aware of a number of censuses that had not been included in the hints. What would happen if I added those?

At this point I realized that it was too late to stop. This was like a game, and I was addicted to it. Ancestry was “The System” – and it was fun to try to beat The System – even while using it to support my own research. Owners of the other PMTs were other (human) players. I could see and use their research, but they could see and use mine, too.

So when and how would I add new information and where would it lead? For my mother’s family in particular, I have quite a bit of information that neither Ancestry nor the PMTs have. I felt like a chess player considering her next move: should I go ahead and add the name of my mother’s paternal grandfather or should I just cite and link to the two censuses (1880 and 1900) that show her father living with his father? (OK, having just written this I realize that it sets off major geek alarms.) And will this – through my great-grandfather’s distinctive first name – then lead Ancestry to my great-grandfather’s family back in South Carolina? I suspect it will. (And it was no easy thing for me to find this family originally!)

It’s not that I resent sharing the information; if I did, I wouldn’t have put so much of it in Featured Family Friday and Surname Saturday posts. But at least from there people have to cut and paste and then enter the information in their programs.

But there is no question of whether I will make my Next Big Move, simply one of how and when I will make it.

Because I am the Tree Trampler, the Destroyer of the System. Show me what you’ve got, Ancestry – I laugh at the few puny censuses you throw at me, ‘cause I’ve got that many up my sleeve, and a Will-Bomb and a Land Deed-Grenade in reserve.

So how come I have this sneaky feeling that Ancestry has outmaneuvered me by luring me in, taking all the stuff I throw at it and … making that stuff its own content?

Maybe I’ll keep that Will-Bomb in reserve.

Questions that I have:

1. Is there any way to use the forms for additional sources on Ancestry’s PMTs to generate decent source citations?

2. Is it OK to upload an image to my PMT that I originally downloaded from a site such as FamilySearch Record Search?

3. My PMT shows up to the right of census images linked to citations, but not in the Search PMTs function. Is there a certain minimum number of individuals the tree has to contain before it will show up there? (I seem to remember seeing the figure “50” somewhere – Apple’s Tree or Genea-Musings? – but can’t seem to find it now.)

Wordless Wednesday: The Blues (and one White)

Still catching up....

Monday, June 14, 2010

Memory Monday: Housekeeping

I learned so much about housekeeping from my mother.

Most of it is useless today.

Mary Warren’s post “Remember the Basic Rules for Clothes Lines?” at Mary’s Musings reminded me of this.

Clotheslines and clothespins … yeah. And the “science of the sprinkler bottle.”

Clothes come in from clothes line. Clothes are sprinkled with water from sprinkler bottle (Classic Coke bottle with special sprinkler adapter in top). Clothes are divided into “starch” and “no starch” piles, carefully rolled or folded up, and put into plastic bags. Bags are placed in freezer until ready to iron.

Clothespins had their own rituals. Ours went into a red plastic bucket that formerly held a large quantity of vanilla ice cream. These were not the old single-piece clothespins but the spring-action ones. Both were perfect for various craft projects. Second and third grade were big craft years, and around that time a whole bunch of our clothes pins disappeared and became residents of Clothespin Town.

The day Mom and I brought home our first dryer was an occasion of tremendous joy for both of us. We no longer had to rig up an ineffective clothesline system inside the house to dry clothes in the dead of winter and ironing was reduced to a minimum.

One thing was missing – the smell of clothes fresh from the clothesline and freshly starched and ironed clothes. Now we have to add those little scented sheet thingies to try to duplicate those fragrances.

Speaking of science, getting stains out of the carpet was an advanced science. First, there was the choice of cleaning solvent. Then – brush or rag? And finally, should the solvent be cold, warm, or hot and what kind of motion was best for what kind of rug?

These days there are no carpets in my house and only a few small rugs. Allergies run rampant in my family, and it’s bad enough that we have cats (yeah, I know, not smart for a family like ours, but I direct you to a previous article – The Language of Cats – which explains how and why we are Crazy Cat People). I’m more into the Science of Mopping these days.

Not all housecleaning is science. Some of it is art. Like stacking and drying dishes. That was one of the first chores I had to do as a child. The dishes had to be stacked in absolutely perfect, logical, artful order (my requirement, not my parents’). (I still do this in the dishwasher. Problem is, my concept of art is not my husband’s concept. When we’re not reversing the direction of the toilet paper on the roller after the other one has put on a new roll, we’re redoing the loading of the dishes in the dishwasher.) Terry-cloth towels were a no-no. It was bad form to leave little knots of cloth on the dishes. Linen towels – thick enough to last through a good-sized batch of dishes without getting sopping wet – were the thing. The real trick was to rinse the dishes in very hot water (the job of the dishwasher (= person washing the dishes, not the machine) – hopeless case when my brother filled that role) and then let them sit for about half an hour (a breeze is nice if possible). Then one towel will suffice.

Some years ago my in-laws bought us The World’s Greatest Dishwasher. It’s my baby. Stacking is still an art, but the rest is up to Modern Science.

Waxing the floor was also an art. I never mastered it. I like wooden floors better, anyway, and linoleum no longer needs to be waxed.

Then there was The Iron Arm. It was necessary to develop an Iron Arm for several regular and occasional chores: vacuuming (vacuums were hopelessly low-powered in those days, so a lot more movement of the wand was required, and they were also extremely heavy and difficult to lug around), fruit cake preparation (see Advent Calendar Day 14: Fruitcake), and window washing. These days I have a modern, lighter, and more effective vacuum; I enjoy eating my mother-in-law’s fruitcakes at Christmastime; and washing the windows – yeah, I’ll get around to that some time….

By my calculations, I had mastered about half the arts and sciences necessary for the degree of Domestic Goddess by the time I was 12 years old. But modern science has eliminated the need for those skills. However, there is one thing that modern science has not done: it has not resulted in the invention of a Fail-Proof Junk and Crud Picker-Upper. And that’s why, science or no science, art or no art, my house is still a mess.

Pages

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Friday, June 18, 2010

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Monday, June 14, 2010