My Trails into the Past

It's Saturday Night , time for more Genealogy Fun !! For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), answer the question: 1)  What were the occupations of your ancestors? 2)  Please go back several generations (say parents or grandparents or great-grandparents) and list the occupations that they had in the records you've found for them.  You could do this, say, by ancestor table number. 3)  Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this blog post, or in a post on Facebook. I am also listing by ancestor number, skipping myself. Some of my ancestors were easy to document because California has both city directories and voter registrations to supplement time between census records. But my Texas ancestors have few records. I am also stopping with my great-grandparents. 2. William J. Hork (1930-2007), my father, had these occupations: 1950: Fitzpatrick Chevy Dealer as parts chaser and grease monkey 1953: Flying A Se...

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. Sometimes the way we find out that there was a court case is from an article in the newspaper. In the Joplin News Herald on 3 September 1926 was an article about Fred O. Banks of Carthage, Missouri filing a suit against the Empire District Electric Company and Joe Gorrell, asking for $10,000 damages for the death of his wife in an automobile accident. [1] Surely there was more information about the accident earlier in the newspaper. Sure enough, in the 19 August 1926 issue of the Joplin Globe newspaper, a longer article about the accident was published. [2] Joe Gorrell, who was the driver of a service truck for the electric company, refused to testify at an inquest. So the jury returned an open verd...

Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great documenting our own. I’ll write about what I’ve been doing the past week. This idea came from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing, who started this meme. Genealogy Blog Writing : I wrote the following blog post this week: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks  For week 12, I wrote about no. 12 in my husband’s ahnetafel chart: his great-grandfather, Nils Malkom Nilsen. For Saturday Night Genealogy Fun , we were asked to writing about the birth order of one of our lines. So I did one of my grandmother’s side. Webinars/Study Groups Attended:   I attended: “The Five-Story Fall: Correlating Indirect and Direct Evidence to Extend the Pedigree,” by Debbie Mieszala, CG, for BCG Legacy Family Tree Webinars. “One African American Family’s Story of Migration,” J. Mark Lowe, CG, for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. “Scarlet Letters: Copyright, Ethics and Family Correspon...

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. The Ahnentafel number 8 in my husband’s ancestry is his great-grandfather, Nils Malkom Nilsen. I have written a book about three generations of his Swedish family back in 2010 but have not written much about him on the blog. [1] He spent his entire life as a Swedish Covenant minister, moving from city to city, as he made his way further west. I don’t really know much about him personally, and neither did his grandchildren. He died when they were very young. He left no writings either, which is unusual for a minister. So I thought about it. Perhaps no writings were left because they were written in Swedish. All of his congregations were Swedish-Americans. He served parishes in Sheffield, Pennsylvania...

Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great documenting our own. I’ll write about what I’ve been doing the past week. This idea came from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing, who started this meme. Genealogy Blog Writing : I wrote the following blog post this week: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks  For week 11, I wrote about the large family that the Thomas & Mary Nicholas Davey had. Unfortunately out of the fifteen children, only seven lived to adulthood. I wrote about a slave distribution in my Thomas Haley family in Rankin County, Mississippi . It is important to share this information so the descendants of enslaved people might be able to make the connection. For Saturday Night Genealogy Fun , where we wrote about a favorite photo.   Webinars/Study Groups/Lectures Attended:   I participated in the AmericaGen Study Group - Chapter 20 Local Land Records . I attended the Contra ...

It's Saturday Night , time for more Genealogy Fun !! For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you to: 1)  Show us one of your favorite photographs of your family - a group, yourself, your mom, your dad, your sibling(s), your grandparents, etc.  Tell us about it - the date, the event, the setting, the persons in the photograph. 2)  Share it on your own blog, in a comment on this blog, or on Facebook. I have many favorite photos and hope to someday put together some family books so I can use them. In particular, I like this one photo. I think because it has that hippie and groovy vibe. It was one of the last times we visited our cousins as a complete family. After this, we would sometimes have other activities or job responsibilities and we couldn’t always go together as a family to other cousin events. These are my parents, Lea and Bill and their children: Lisa, Steve, Jon, Danna, Sabrina, and Renee. The occas...

My fourth great-grandfather, Thomas Haley, died 26 January 1851 in Rankin County, Mississippi. At the time of his death, his son Thomas J. Haley stated his father died without a will, and that he had over two thousand acres of land and twelve slaves. [1] This post will discuss the distribution of the slaves, especially to Benjamin W. Jones and his wife, Amanda (Haley) Jones, my third great-grandfather. By publishing this information, descendants of these enslaved people might be able to make a connection and further their own research. These enslaved people were part of the Haley and Jones family and community, too. Distribution Those twelve slaves who were part of the estate were “a negro man Sam [,] a negro girl Sarah [,] a negro girl Charlotte [,] a negro boy Josephus [,] a negro girl Ally [,] a boy Sam [,] a boy Isaac [,] a boy Jordan [,] and one boy Moses and a girl Phillis and her child and a girl Celia .” [2] In the December term 1851, Thomas J. Haley report...