My Trails into the Past

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's  Saturday Night  again -  Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to:  1)  Do you know what activities one of your ancestors/relatives engaged in?  How much detail do you know about those activities? 2)  Use the FREE artificial intelligence tool  Google Gemini 3  to describe what your ancestor or relative experienced in his/her activities (e.g., military service, a ship they migrated on, an occupation, an office they held, etc.).  Here's mine: I started out stating the following to Google Gemini 3: “My father-in-law was landing gear specialist during WWII in the Army Air Forces in England, stationed at Burtonwood. What would his job have been like?” The AI answer is this: That is a fascinating bit of family history. Being a landing gear specialist at RAF Burtonwood during WWII meant your father-in-law was at the absolu...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's  Saturday Night  again -  Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to:  1)  It's Valentine's Day - a day for lovers! We all have hundreds of love stories in our ancestry. 2)  What was the great love story of the ancestors in your family Tree?  What wedding had a great story in it?  Choose one ancestral couple. Share how they met (if known), when and where they married. Note how long they were married. Highlight something that suggests affection or partnership. Here's mine: I have written about my parents a few times before. My paternal grandparents split up after 15 years or so. My maternal grandparents had issues but stayed married until my grandfather died. My grandmother lived another 40 years. I shall write instead of my husband’s parents: George Joseph Gorrell and Thelma Marie Nilsen. They married on 6 October ...

An heirloom we have is the autograph book belonging to Joseph Norman Gorrell. It appears the book was signed between 1893 and 1898. [1] Joseph was born on 9 March 1869 to Amos Gorrell, Jr, and Catherine E Shotts in Blackwater, Cooper County, Missouri. [2] He was the third child of six and the first son. [3] Autograph books back then were not about collecting signatures of famous people. But rather, friends, family, and classmates wrote sentimental sayings, along with their signatures. Autograph books have been around a long time. In Germany, they were called Stammbuch , Töpferalbum , or Album Amicorum (book of friends). [4] They were often used by university students, much as yearbooks are used today. This autograph book has a lovely cover with the letters “Autographs” embossed along with flowers. The pages inside have yellowed, but might have been buff colored. What would have been the occasion of Joseph receiving or purchasing the book? There is no title page, or a page that ...

Thelma Nilsen Gorrell (1926-2018), my mother-in-law, was one hundred percent Swedish, although she was third-generation here. She had fond memories of the Swedish food served at holidays, but she never learned how to make it, as her mother died when Thelma was young. One day, she found a little Swedish cookbook compiled by Julia Peterson Tufford from Minnesota. In it, she rediscovered some of the treats she remembered. Today, the poor book is falling apart, but she scanned the pages and shared them with us. Here are some of the favorites that were made often. Swedish Potato Sausage (Potatiskorv) . My husband, Norman, loves this dish. It is labor-intensive. When we first learned to make it, Thelma used an old-fashioned hand-cranked meat grinder. Later, she purchased a Kitchen Aid mixer that had a meat grinder attachment. That cut down the grinding time by half.  My husband found a sausage stuffer that made stuffing the sheep casings easier than with the grinder attachment. We al...

Last week, while searching for articles about school census records, I discovered an article about Pleasant Grove School for the 1884-85 school year. Pleasant Grove School was in LaMine Township, Cooper County, Missouri. Amos Gorrell’s children attended the school. The newspaper article gave great information about the school and the top students who attended during that term. The term lasted six months. Fifty-one students were enrolled. Grades The most interesting part of the article was the posting of the students’ grade standings. Two of Amos’s daughters, Lou Gorrell and Linnie Gorrell, had the highest standings at 98. Their sister, Ada, had 95, and their brother, Joe, had 90, and finally, their youngest brother, Arthur, had 80. [1] In 1884-85, these children were the following ages by 14 March 1885, the end of the term. Louella, 18 Linnie Sarah, 17 Ada Leah, 12 Joe, 16 Arthur, 9 The term ended earlier than it does now, probably so the children could be of use at h...

This past week I have attended the Texas Institute of Genealogy Research (TIGR), held virtually via Zoom. I'm taking the AI course coordinated by Nicole Dyer and her co-instructors Angela McGhie, Diana Elder, Mark Thompson, Steve Little, Jan Joyce, Alice Childs, Mark Humphries,   and Katherine Schober. It has been an action-packed class, with lots of hands-on practice using many pre-written prompts, as well as our own, in several different AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, AI Studio, and Gemini. I have practiced many different uses. I want to share one of those in this post. In the past, I wrote nine blog posts about my husband's father, George Joseph Gorrell, who was an Army Air Corps mechanic during WWII in England. In one exercise where we were to learn about our writing style and create a writing style guide, I used a project in ChatGPT, uploading the nine Word documents. The AI analyzed the writing and said:  "The style is ideal for a family history blog: war...

Amos Gorrell was born on 12 February 1837 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania to Amos Gorrell and Leah Wollam. He married Catherine Elizabeth (Shotts) Sayre, widow of Lemuel Sayre, on 6 February 1866 in Ross County, Ohio. They moved the next month to Missouri. Amos kept a diary he purchased yearly that fit in a pocket. His daily entries were short and somewhat cryptic. This year's diary was found in the effects of William Amos Netherton, grandson of Amos, through his daughter Linnie Sarah (Gorrell) Netherton. Karen Netherton and Carolyn (Netherton) Clark transcribed it in 1982. They had not yet moved to Cooper County and were living in Saline County. The nearest town was Arrow Rock. Examples from the 1868 diary are below. Misspellings are Amos'. Wednesday, Jan. 1s t. Weather clear and pleasent New years day (of ears). Mr. Collins and wife comes down to our house. We have an Egg Nog and dinner here. We are engaged Salting away our meat, rendering lard, making Sausage, etc. Mrs. Colli...

The day I met my future mother-in-law I knew it would be a good relationship. I had been seeing her son for about a year or two. We met at the trolley museum off Highway 12 when I came up with friends from the train club. We all loved volunteering there: running streetcars, maintaining the track, and working on rebuilding cars in the shop. He lived on the museum site as a sort-of caretaker and worked in Rio Vista during the week as a welder. Later, he took a job closer to where I lived and moved to Pleasant Hill. I do not remember the exact circumstances that led us to visit his parents at their home. His mother welcomed me warmly. She gave me a tour of the house and when I saw a bookcase in the hall, I knew I had found a kindred soul. Books can reveal a bit of one’s personality. She was an avid reader of fiction. Many of the books on her shelf were also on my shelves. She had a whole collection of Louis L’Amour books, and he was one of my favorite authors then. She also had the Mrs. P...

What does one write when our families do not have cultural traditions? Are our family traditions cultural at all? Hork Family Traditions When growing up, we had some holiday traditions. Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were always at the Hork house, as our house was large enough to seat everyone. The maternal grandparents and great-aunt came to us, bringing salads and dessert. Mom cooked the rest: turkey for Thanksgiving and a ham for Christmas. The side courses were always candied yams, mashed potatoes and gravy with giblets, cornbread stuffing, and peas with onions. Hors d′oeuvres consisted of potato chips with onion dip, carrot, celery, radish, and green onion sticks, and smoked baby oysters. Dessert was a variety of pies: pumpkin, mincemeat, pecan, or apple. My mother made us recipe books when we married and here is her recipe for the turkey and stuffing. Gorrell Family Traditions At the Gorrell house, they also had turkey on Thanksgiving with a sage stuffing, mashed potatoes, gr...