Ancestral Musings

This week's theme is a bit open-ended (as usual).  Education in the United States has always been a hot topic but it has not always been available to everyone.  However, in my family, I think that at least back to my great-grandparents, everyone knew how to read and write, whether they got any formal education or not.  My maternal grandmother, Grace McDuff, took her high school diploma and was hired to teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Eastern Washington.  She was introduced to Melvin Belknap, married him, and thus ended her teaching career, a little over a year after it began.  It did not end her involvement in education however.  Thanks to Newspapers.com, I discovered that my grandmother was active in PTA when my mom would have been in elementary school in 1930, even serving as president one year.  That PTA ended up providing soup for school kids' lunches during the Depression, so I guess even then people recognized that you learned better when you ...

This is a tough one!  I haven't found anyone who looks like they should have been somewhere else, though I do have a couple who have disappeared from where they should be.  On the other hand, I have this weird little anomaly in the line back from my mother that I've been exploring today.  It showed up when I started looking at my sister's Ancestry DNA matches.  The first thing I noticed was that this particular match shared matches from both our maternal and paternal sides.  Everything I have ever seen about these people did not lead me to believe that their paths across the continent would ever have intersected (though of course, people are notorious for not staying put).  They seemed to have simply moved west in parallel.  I still have no idea where the lines cross but: On Ancestry, you can look at shared surnames and, in this instance, I found that my sister had Sarah Griggs (1712-1746) while the match had Hannah Griggs (1702-1798).  Casual res...

Well, as Amy Johnson Crow notes, even though she's used this prompt before, it is impossible to pick just one favorite photograph!  So, this is my parents' wedding photo, I believe (or one taken very near the day).  They were married on July 6, 1941, confirmed by a very fun social events article I found in the Daily Olympian, thanks to Newspapers.com.  This is Cecil and Ruth (Belknap) Prewitt.  I keep this picture on view in my own home.  My father survived World War II in pretty good shape actually, despite a prolonged sojourn in the Aleutians.  My mother had spent much of the war living with her own mother and my sister, born in 1942.  Mom and Dad were married for 43 years, until my mother's passing in 1984.