Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - What Genealogy Activity Have You Spent Time On?

It's Saturday Night -

time for more Genealogy Fun!

Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing is to:

1)  What genealogy activity have you spent time on this week?

2)  Write your own blog post, or add your response as a comment to this blog post, in a Facebook Status post or note.

Here's mine:

Part of the week, I worked on creating a detailed timeline for my father’s great-aunt, Helena M. Gleeson. She never married and worked most of her life as either a school teacher or grammar school principal. For two years, she served as Deer Lodge County Superintendent of Schools for the term 1899-1900.

How did I do it? I used a word processing program. Each line is a fact, recorded chronologically. I began with the basic information: birth, baptism, census records, death, and burial. I then filled in the details using newspaper, directory, and deed records. The timeline ended up being eight pages!

I also learned a lot about Aunt Helena. Besides teaching school, she liked singing and was involved in women’s organizations. She was a member of the Anaconda’s Woman’s Club, the Woman’s Literary Club, and the Catholic Ladies’ Aid Society.

The Anaconda Standard, the local newspaper published many articles about the teachers at the schools. Twice a year, the school board hired teachers for the fall and spring terms and their names were published. There were also articles describing the vacations and trips teachers took during their vacations. Helena visited her parents who lived in Portland often, but also visited brothers in Alaska, San Francisco, and Chicago, and family in Los Angeles. She hosted parties and attended parties hosted by others.

Helena also had some health issues, though the articles never gave details. Some of these illnesses prevented her from working.

For a time in the last 1890s two of her sisters lived with her: Elizabeth and Margaret. Margaret later moved to Portland to live with her parents and taught school there.

Helena worked for the school district until the mid-1930s, when she moved to Los Angeles, likely to be near her sisters, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Mary Martha.

She died 4 November 1950 of heart-related illness and is buried at Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.

I have a few more records to acquire and I believe I’ll have a nice bit of information to write up her biography, much better than the one I wrote in 2004, which was only a paragraph. So much more is available online now, especially with the digitization of newspapers. I am thankful she lived in a town that reported on the comings and goings of their citizens.

Here is a portion of my timeline:

The next timeline will be for her younger sister, Margaret T. Gleeson.

Copyright © 2022 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.