Ancestral Musings

Land is an easier topic to face, except in this case, there's just too much material!   From their arrival in the New World, my ancestors have been concerned with acquiring land, but that mostly seems to have been a desire to make a living and survive rather than greed, since no one got rich (or, at least, not too rich, nor did they manage to hold on to any riches they may have acquired.  Ahem). So I've done a lot less research on the Prewitt side of the family but land does seem to have been the goal of the first Prewitt to land here, in Virginia, in 1636 as an indentured servant to a widow, Joane Bennet.  After his five years of servitude, he was due 50 acres of land in what became York County, Virginia, which he apparently received.  He married, but his marriage was not considered valid as he was a Quaker, not a member of the established Church of England, and he thus was charged with fornication (it is not clear to me whether he and his wife Sarah ever wen...

Still a week behind.  Alas, that's probably how it's going to remain! So, Air.  This was acknowledged by Amy Johnson Crow to maybe be a hard one, and yeah, it is.  No hot air balloonists in my family tree, nor ace pilots (well, that may not be true), but there are some small vignettes I'll share here.  Looking at these stories now, they are kind of outlandish and I have not verified some of the details so no one starting writing a book based on this! First, my mother's family had a friend whose name was Bob D. (I am not absolutely certain of the details about Bob but somewhere I have a contemporary news clipping about this and I when I find it, I'll add it in).  Bob was a pilot for the Canadian RAF before the United States joined World War II.  Obviously, he knew how to fly.  For some reason, he was back home in or around Olympia and took my mother up in a small plane.  My mother apparently got motion sickness and threw up something red, which...

OK, I've slipped another day in the challenge.  I am now 8 days behind.  In my defense, we had to take our dog in this morning for surgery for a cancerous lump and I was pretty bummed most of yesterday.  The dog is doing fine, despite the large shaved patch on his rump, and I'm feeling much better except for all of the sleep I lost last night, worrying.  This week's challenge was "Fire" and I've got very little except a small family story. My parents owned a little house in the town of Sedro-Woolley Washington from about 1949 to 1965.  I do mean little.  The hotwater heater was in the bathroom which was between the two bedrooms in the house.  The house next door was so close, on Google Earth you cannot see a space between them.  But we had good neighbors and enough of a yard that my father decided to add to the house.  I assume he got permits but this was about 1959 so maybe?  In any case, he added a bedroom in the back, a utility room...

All of my European ancestors came here over the water.  The Dutch ones crossed the Atlantic three times before they ended up in New York in the mid-17th century.  But, I'd like to talk for a moment about the ancestors who ended up next to the Ohio River. Zachariah Hole and his wife, Hannah Delay Hole, settled in southern Ohio, on the site of the future parking lot of the Cincinati Reds in 1789.  When I first came across this story, I was particularly taken with the enthusiam of the story teller because this is a matter of pride:  not that Zachariah was a veteran of the Revolutionary War or that it took some gumption to settle in what was then a pretty hostile wilderness, but that he had the foresight to settle in what would become a parking lot for a baseball stadium! The ballpark is on the Ohio River and in the picture I've seen, the mouth of the Licking River is visible across the Ohio in Kentucky.  Water was important as a means of transportation and commer...

#52ancestors  I'm remaining a bit behind.  The whole coronavirus thing is very distracting, even though our lives are not strongly affected by staying home.  Since we are retired, we often stay home anyway.  On Sunday we go to church and on Tuesday we go to Taco Tuesday with my sister and her family, and on Fridays we usually go to the daily Mass at our parish and then out to breakfast with some of the other attendees.  And that is pretty much it!  Without any of those activities, we are just adrift on a featureless sea of days . . . So, Week 13's prompt of Nearly Forgotten is a bit of a downer.  I mean, how do we think about people that we barely remember ever existed?  I have been chasing down one ancestor though who kind of got lost in the shuffle.  Barnard Case was a sibling of the Case that I normally think of as my ancestor:  Ebenezer Case.  So, Barnard's great-great granddaughter, Roby Bryan, married the great-great grandso...