52 Ancestors: Week 34--Chosen Family—The Gleeson Family of Ontario, South Dakota, and Oregon

This is my third 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.

I am choosing the Gleeson Family, from my father’s maternal line, to write about this week. This family was the first one I chose to write a book about in 2004.

It started with receiving a photo album that Muriel Martha Gilbert, daughter of Mary Martha Gleeson and Warren Edmond Gilbert, put together of her Tierney grandparents and great-aunts and uncles, and of her Gleeson parents and their children.

It is in a beautifully leather-bound album. Most of the photos are photo cards, taken in the late 1800s, some in Canada and some in South Dakota. Many of the photos are labeled in an index in the front. There are missing photos, where they are listed in the index but the photos do not appear in the album.

What started with the idea of the book were my thoughts on how best to share these wonderful photos. This was in the early 2000s. Most of us didn’t have access to scanners. I started by removing the photos carefully. Using the macro lens on my SLR film camera, I shoot photos of each using black and white film. I did this outside in a shaded area in order to use natural lighting. My sister-in-law processed the film and printed the photos for me. Later, I scanned the original photos for the book with my own scanner.

I learned how to use a publishing program called PageMaker and used it to create the book. I created separate chapters for each generation, starting with Martin Gleeson, the immigrant from Ireland. The chapters were:

• Martin and Ann Gleeson
• John and Margaret Gleeson
• Ann & John H Sullivan
• Anna & William Cyril Hork
• Appendix that covered John’s wife, Margaret’s Tierney Family, John H Sullivan’s parents and siblings, William Cyril Hork’s parents and siblings, including his mother’s Sievert family.

I filled the book with photos from the album and cited the sources, using endnotes in the appendix. As I look at the source citations today, I see they lack depth and completeness. Oh, I have learned so much since then.

I printed out the book on my home computer and had Kinkos spiro-bind the books for me. My intent was to give them to my father and his three sisters for Christmas that year. I did wrap them and deliver them to my father, but somehow, no one received the copies, and they must have found themselves in the Christmas trash.

Since that time, I have amassed much more information about the family that the book could be twice as large. I have been thinking about updating it. Alas, I should have done it sooner, as my father and his three sisters have since passed away. And now my cousin, Gigi, who was a great lover of our genealogy, has also recently died this month.

The Gleesons, the chosen family for my first genealogy book about our family.

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.