My Trails into the Past

Hey genea-folks, it's Saturday Night again, time for more Genealogy Fun! Our mission this week from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to: 1) What is the most wild, crazy, off-the-wall, or really stupid thing you have done in pursuit of your ancestral families and their family history? Here’s mine: I don’t know if I have ever done a wild, crazy, off-the-wall or really stupid thing in pursuit of my genealogy. I try to be very careful in my research. I recorded what I found in notebooks and didn’t just make photocopies. I knew enough to record some kind of citation even if it wasn’t to Evidence Explained standards (of course that book wasn’t even written yet. I used Evidence! Elizabeth Shown Mills first book.) But a wild thing my husband and I did in pursuit of my having my own copies of tombstone photos was to seek out eight different cemeteries around the Greenbrier area in Faulkner County, Arkansas, and comb through them looking for my Loveless ancestors and collate...

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. In the spring of 2015, my husband and I made our first trip to Arkansas to visit his cousin’s husband, who lived in Hot Springs. Since Hot Springs was so close to Conway in Faulkner County, I planned a three day trip to Conway and Little Rock where I would conduct research in the local museum, courthouse, recorder’s office, university library, and the state archives. The highlight of the trip was visiting the eight cemeteries located in Conway and the outskirts. I thank my husband for being so patient, first for trying to find the very small, old cemeteries on narrow country roads, and second for helping me find the various tombstones to photograph. We had no maps and only names and dates to search for. ...