Ancestral Musings

The census suggests a lot of things, but this one was not something I expected.  I was browsing Ancestry which suggested a hint from the 1930 census for my great-grandparents (my maternal grandmother's parents, northern European ancestry).  I love looking at the census records and I am getting better at reading them for maximum information.  On this particular page, my eye was caught by the oddity that there was only one veteran marked out of all the people on the page, and this veteran, Sanford England, seemed to have served in the Spanish American War, not the Great War as you might have expected.  My great-grandfather was too old to have participated so I wasn't too worried about him but this other fellow who lived five doors down from him on Pacific Highway in the precinct of Tumwater Washington. . . Sanford England was living as a boarder in the home of Edward Scott and his wife and mother-in-law.   He was 59, born in Indiana, while both of his parents...

This prompt has come up in previous years which is kind of a gift really because there are a bunch of favorite photos in my possession and I'm happy to have the opportunity to share them!  This year I am especially happy revisit my photographs because just before Christmas a distant, previously unknown, cousin, sent me a bunch of pictures of people in my branch of our family.   These are amazingly high quality, high resolution, black and white, mostly studio portraits plus some more informal photographs.  The absolutely most remarkable thing about them was that nearly all of them were labeled with the names of the subjects.  Putting faces to names I knew, in some cases, since childhood or learned in the course of researching my family history was a true gift. I haven't scanned these photos yet:  I've just photographed a few of them with my phone camera, but I will try to share a couple of them here.  Thank you Cousin K! This adorable tea party is compr...

 Yeah, I never got around to writing week 4, even though I had an idea, because we spent the week trying to stay warm in the middle of a very long, Arctic, cold snap (winter storm Fern) that started with snow that turned to ice.  Our front yard is still under ice, as are our sidewalks because when they ploughed our street they dumped that ice on the sidewalks, thus rendering them impossible to shovel.  We've left our faucets dripping, even during the day, hoping to avoid burst pipes.  I just looked at our energy (gas and electric) bill for the last month and let's just say I am grateful that at least it has no commas.  But, onward! For week 4, I was thinking of writing about my paternal grandmother, Olive (Howdeshell) Keeton Prewitt.  Olive was born in rural Missouri, maybe 30 miles from where my grandfather was living.  Her first husband was Charles Keeton, and from that marriage my 1/2 aunt Ione was born in 1904.  Ollie married my grandfather G....

 A little reflection on why I have enjoyed this genealogical hobby so much:  there are so many, many stories that are still available if you know where to look for them (or just get lucky!).  I've pretty much stuck to the American story because both sides of my family came to North America in the 17th century, and both sides belonged to religious sects that were deeply invested in record-keeping.  Other people married in of course, not all of them as excited about keeping track of where they came from, and finding their stories has been much more challenging (my paternal grandmother's family for instance now seems to all be buried in the middle of someone's cornfield in Missouri).  But all of it adds up to a lot of the history of the United States: good, bad, ugly, noble, funny, tragic.  Pilgrims and indentured servants arrived within a couple of decades of each other.  The Dutch Reform members came a few years later, and a few of those came by way of ...

Well, I've already missed week one, An Ancestor that I Admire, so I'll just put do a sort of general musing here on the notion of records. Here in the United States, we are lucky that newspapers from previous centuries are full of the social news of towns, large and small.  My family in the U.S. has never exactly been prominent:  we are not good at getting wealthy or holding land or running for office, but one thing my ancestors did was participate in civic life.  My maternal grandmother, Grace McDuff Belknap, apparently registered to vote as soon as she was able (she was born in 1895 in Washington state, where women got the right to vote in 1910.  For many years, she served as an election judge.  But where I found her in the paper was as an officer in the PTA of the local elementary school, finally president.  No one ever mentioned a word about this and I would not have known if the Daily Olympian hadn't made it their business to report all the local news ...

 It's been a while!  When last seen, I was recovering from another round of COVID but mostly I've been well since then.  It seems that COVID is here to stay (no surprise there) so this may not be my last contact with it. Members of the Club.  Well.  Family members have joined a number of organizations, mostly respectable, though I suspect at least one of these was a little sketchy.  I will start with the earliest I know about. There is a vague indication that my 2x great uncle Pearl McDuff belonged to a group that I think  had to do with his time as an undertaker, but the truth is they could easily have been much less respectable.  I'm hoping not, but it's been hard to find any information.  We will for now give Uncle Pearl the benefit of the doubt. For whatever reason, the International Order of Odd Fellows seems to turn up in references pretty often.  The fact is, I've never found that anyone in my family actually joined this group, bu...