Ancestral Musings

I'm putting these two together so I can finish 2020 with a clean challenge slate and start 2021 without guilt (much).   It is now the last week of December, 2020 and coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are being distributed as I type.  It would be too much to say that the end is in sight, but the possibility of an end exists now.  Unfortunately, we are in the middle of a surge that seems downright apocalyptic in some areas of the country (and world) so clearly there are miles to go before we can relax and take off those masks. Just one little story for winter:  my grandmother, Grace McDuff Belknap, was born on June 19, 1895.  My grandmother, in a rare moment of talking about the past, told me that the night before she was born, there had been a frost that killed all the potatoes. Astronomical summer began on June 21st that year (thank you Google!) so this was definitely unusually late for winter weather!  Grandma told me that her father told h...

This is a broad, broad topic.  In one sense, we are all witnessing history right now.  This week has seen the beginning of the use of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID 19, soon to be followed by the Moderna vaccine and eventually others, hopefully putting an end to this pandemic.  2020 has been a long year--it feels like a decade has passed since March 1st--but I hope we'll be able to take some lessons from what has happened. This much suffering should result in a proportional increase in wisdom! Witnessing history.  My Grandmother Grace Belknap, 1895-1969, probably saw some of the biggest changes, though she never talked much about the early years.  The Wright brothers flew their first plane when she was 8 years old, automobiles began to appear on the roads, World War I and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic occurred. In Washington state, women got the vote in 1910, but the rest of the country got it in 1920. The Great Depression.  In 1936, Grace's husband was k...

 There are a lot of mistakes to be made (and hopefully corrected) in genealogy research!  Now, I am not being a very careful researcher, at least in the sense that I am not usually citing the records that give me the data, but I do generally notice if other people's trees have someone getting married at age 5 or having children before they themselves were born.  That often sends me off on a trail of documents, at which point I find myself being grateful for the careful record keeping of groups like the Dutch Reform Church or even the Quakers.  Civil records have also been very helpful too of course, but it is there that I find the most transcription errors.  Herewith, some examples: The first one I found was an individual whose name was transcribed (by whom, I am not sure) from the 1910 census entry as "Jane Kettion."  I could find absolutely no one who matched that name and no reason for her to exist either as she was described as a very young daughter of ...

 I am playing catchup here and these two themes seem to work together well.  I am going to shift my focus for the moment to my husband's side of the family:  after all, our children might actually look at this someday and wonder why I never mention their family name!   This will come under the "hearsay" category of research.  In other words, I have no way to confirm this story as it was told to me, but it seems likely and I did see the outcome many years later!  I did talk about these folks a little in week 11 but there are a few more details. My late mother-in-law was the middle child of three surviving children (her older brother George had died as an infant in 1919).  lived in Brooklyn, as anyone who ever heard Edith speak could attest.  When their mother died of cancer in 1932, their father Charles Kober was left with three young children to raise--Edith was 7, her little sister Dotty was 6, and their big brother John was about 12.  ...

 I am going to play catchup here, so these next few posts are going to be a little squished together in terms of posting time.   Different language posed a problem for me.  Most of my European ancestors were English, at least the ones I know anything about.   There are some Dutch ancestors on my mother's side (religious refugees, Dutch Reform, who ended up settled in the Hudson River valley in the mid 17th century) and some Alsatian ancestors on my father's  (again, religious refugees, Huguenots this time) who ended up in Loudon Virginia in the second half of the 18th century.  It is anyone's guess which language, German or French, the Alsatians spoke daily, though their names were all Germanic for one or two generations.  The Dutch presumably spoke Dutch initially.  However, there are no remnants of any of these languages in the names or speech of any modern family members. It's a different situation in my husband's family.  Both o...

 I am so far behind on this challenge now that I will probably just skip a few of the topics that don't really interest me that much.  Pandemic lockdown has returned in a slightly less draconian form, but prudence has dictated that we minimize our time in grocery and other stores (though I'm afraid we are not very good at that!) and all indoor dining has been stopped in restaurants in Washington state.  We've done take-out from one of our favorite local establishments so far, and I expect we'll do it a couple more times, but truthfully we aren't quite done with the Thanksgiving leftovers yet.  We look forward to the end of this pandemic, hopefully with the introduction of several vaccines in the next couple of months. So, bearded.  The first thing that struck me as I looked at all of the available pictures of my male ancestors was that practically no one had a beard (my husband does have a beard but I don't think he wants to be featured here!).  These guys ...