My Trails into the Past

My great-aunt, Carolyn Hork, also known as Carrie, never married. She lived in Hamilton, Ravalli County, Montana and worked in the local mercantile store as a saleswoman and buyer. Because Hamilton was a small town and neighboring small-town newspapers documented the everyday activities of their area residents. I located many articles about Carrie’s activities in newspapers from Hamilton, Anaconda, and Missoula. The articles named some of friends and described some of her travels. Visits to her sister, Susan The first such article found was her trip to Missoula to visit her older sister, Susan, who married Andrew Edward Hart. [1] Two years later, she visited her sister again in Missoula. [2] There were more that I could have documented. Visits with her sister, Ida In 1908, she took a longer trip to Oakland, California, to visit her sister [3] . Her sister was not named in the article but it was Ida Colmann, who may have moved temporarily to Oakland after the San Francisco earth...

My paternal grandfather’s sister, Carrie, never married. By the time the family arrived in Hamilton, Montana, she was nearly an adult. She performed in plays, participated in social groups such as the Catholic ladies, and worked as a sales lady in clothing and millinery stores. In her spare time, she visited family often in Missoula, where her sister, Mary, lived, and in Tacoma, where her sister, Urselle, lived. She also made trips to Southern California to visit her sister, Ida, and Lexington, Kentucky, to visit her niece. Other times, she traveled with girlfriends and traveled along the countryside in an automobile. In 1936, she took an ocean trip to Alaska with friends, where they visited Juneau and Sitka. On another trip in 1949, she took a seven-week trip to Tacoma, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Carmel and visited friends in Great Falls, Kalispell, and Flathead Lake on her return. These are just a few of the travels recorded by newspapers in small towns, that give g...

We last left off the story of my aunt, Lorene E. Hork and three of her girlfriends and their travels from Japan, after working for the U.S. Army for a year. Check out  Part I ,   Part II , Part III , and Part IV to see their earlier adventures . [1] They left Bombay, India on 24 October 1953 aboard the T.S.S. Jal-Jawahar . She wrote home using the stationery from the ship, which showed an image of the ship and the flag of the Scindia Steam Navigation Company, Limited. I learned that the flag was blue and white with a red swastika, which was an ancient Indian symbol unrelated to Nazi German use. [2] The ship left Bombay, sailed across the Arabian Sea to the Gulf of Aden, and then north in the Red Sea, where it would go through the Suez Canal and stop at Port Said, where they would take a train to Cairo. At least, that was the plan when they purchased their tickets. Aboard this ship, they played deck tennis and deck cards, both English games, and a bingo-like game called Ho...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's  Saturday Night  again - Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing's assignment for us tonight: Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!): 1.  Does your genealogy management software (e.g, Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Legacy Family Tree, Reunion, Heredis, Family Historian, etc.) create a "Fact List" report (or something similar) - a list of the profiles in your family tree that have (or don't have) a specific Fact (e.g., birth, death, burial, immigration, etc.)? 2.  If so, run a Fact List to determine which people have a specific Fact (or don't have a specific Fact) and share it with us.  3.  Share your results with us in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.  Leave a comment on this post with a link to your results. Here’s mine: I, too, use RootsMagic and found all the people wh...

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 1952, my paternal aunt, Lorene E. Hork, applied to work for the U.S. Army in Japan. She wrote home often telling of her adventures and these letters were saved by the family and put together in a binder. I wrote about her adventures in Japan here . Where her year was up, she resigned, and with three girl friends (Anne Ankers, Mitzi Seale, and Donna Oehm) that she met there in Tokyo, embarked on the start of a around the world adventure. I have written several posts about their adventures:      “ Travel--Lorene’s First Leg ”      “ Dear Diary—Taipei, a Continuation of Lorene Hork’s Trip ”      “ Transportation: Lorene Traveled Around the World Part III ”  ...

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 have previously written about my father’s sister, Lorene E. Hork, who worked for the U.S. Army in Tokyo before she and three other girl friends left for a trip around the world in the fall of 1953. Check out  Part I ,   Part II , and Part III . New Delhi We last left Lorene and her three friends in India, where they were about to travel by train to New Delhi. Their ride was twenty-four hours and they had their own compartments with four bunks. To be careful about what they ate, they brought their own food (“C” rations that her friend Dick Ebert gave her). They were filthy from all the smoke. They arrived after nine p.m. and had trouble finding a place to sleep. The YWCA didn’t take guests aft...

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. I was on vacation to New York City from Dec 8 through December 18, visiting with my youngest daughter, Margaret. Our oldest daughter, Elizabeth came to visit for part of the time. We visited the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the Botanical Garden in the Bronx, as well as saw three shows: Oklahoma, Tootsie, and Margaret’s play, A Christmas Carol, a Gay Fantasia. We visited several stores, such as Macy, Bergdorf Goodman, and Bloomingdales where we checked out the decorations and watched the light show on the outside of Saks 5th Avenue. We also ate at some great restaurants. I got in an average of 12,000 steps each day and also managed to catch a cold.  It was cold and wet most of the time but fun to be in the city! Genealogy Blog Wr...

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. I have previously written about my father’s sister, Lorene E. Hork, who worked for the U.S. Army in Tokyo before she and three other gals left for a trip around the world in the fall of 1953. Check out Part I and Part II . I left off the last post with the gals in Taipei, Formosa (now known as Taiwan). They next continued their travels aboard the ship to Hong Kong for a few hours, where they shopped and took a cab to Repulse Bay where they drove “on beautiful winding roads high up in the hills overlooking the City.”  The ship continued onto Manila in The Philippines. There they took a three-hour cab ride around the city, visiting the Malacañang Palace, where the President resides, and viewing the...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has another fun activity for us today.  Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!): 1)  Tell us which ancestral home (an actual building, a village, a town, even a country) you would most like to visit.   Which ancestors lived there, and for how long?  2)  Share your ancestral home information in your own blog post, on Facebook, and leave a link to it in the comments. Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic. The ancestral hometowns I would like to visit is Oberhundem, Kirchhundem, and Altenhundem, which today are very close to each other in the district of Olpe, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.     During the German Empire (1871-1918), there were 1296 inhabitants. [1] My great-grandfather, Johan Anton Hork, ...

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 Client Work I did some deed work at the Contra Costa County recorders office this week, searching from the current owner back to the original one on two different lots. This was more difficult than I had thought and made a couple of errors in reading deeds whose descriptions look similar. I learned a lot and decided that title companies earn their living. In this county, there is no master index so I had to check each two-three year index, and then look at each deed to check to see if it was the one I wanted. I hope someday they put a comprehensive index online along with the images to the deeds. Blog Writing : 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks  For the “easy” theme, I wrote about how small town newspapers help fill out the lives of wo...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's Saturday Night again - time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings : 1)  Each week, The Weekly Genealogist (published by NEHGS) asks a survey question, and readers respond to the question, usually just selecting one of the answer options, and sometimes with paragraphs of information.  Reader Janice Sellers suggested using this week's question. 2)  On 24 July, the question was:  Have you or any of your ancestors traveled across the United States by car, train, wagon, or some other form of transportation that was not an airplane? (You can decide what constitutes a cross-country trip but since the distance from the east coast to the west coast ranges from 2,500 to 3,500 miles, depending on the route, we suggest it should be at least 1,500 miles. Canadian cross-country trips also count.) 3)  Answer the question above in your own blog post, in a commen...

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 Education The major education event this past week was attending GRIP (Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh), where I attended the class, “Tools and Strategies for Tackling Tough Research Problems , ” coordinated by Kimberly T. Powell, and along with additional instructors, Angela McGhie, Karen Stanbary, and Karen Mauer Jones. It was packed with lots of tools and ideas for researching and keeping track of our research results. I will now consider lists, timelines, charts, tables, and spreadsheets to manage all of the data I will accumulate with researching my ancestors’ FAN club. I might even give Scrivener another try. Check out the blog post linked below, where I describe my takeaways from the class. I traveled to Pittsburgh with m...