Ancestral Musings

So this one is likely to be sad.  My mind went to children, an aunt on my father's side, and a cousin on my mother's, who had died before they got a chance to grow up.  Maybe they would have survived if they'd been born in later years when medicine had more tools to help infection or to repair a heart defect but that was not to be. My mother's aunt Myrtle gave birth to baby Dorothy in Meridian, Idaho on November 26, 1916.  Dorothy died that same day, according to her death certificate due to a "failure of valve in heart to close."  She was issued both a birth certificate, since she was born alive, and a death certificate.  Her parents were only 19 and 20 at the time.  Myrtle herself died February 27, 1919, just two years later. My father's sister, Virginia Prewitt*, was born in 1911 and died on November 8, 1914.  The family story was that she was three when this happened, but the cause of death was never mentioned to me.  All I heard was that my g...

This one is kind of a box-checking/discipline exercise so I don't fall behind!  "I can identify" could go a lot of places, but I think I'll pick a photograph and identify the subject! This is the wedding photograph of my husband's parents:  Edith Kober and Eugene Doerflinger, presumably in June of 1946 when they were married.  My late mother-in-law told me that this photo was taken in the photographer's studio, with the flowers and backdrop provided by the photographer.  Edith would have been 21 and her husband 23.  Eugene spent WWII in the Navy as a SeaBee, apparently mostly in the south Pacific though the only documentation I have for that is more photographs in a decidedly tropical setting.  Edith stayed home in New York City, working for some of that anyway as a telephone operator (personal recollection), and eventually starting nursing school, though she dropped out to get married.  (She did eventually get her LPN after her husband's death.) They ...

This one is a little harder.  If you are outcast, you are by definition alone or at least scorned on some level by the society or family you (formerly) lived in.  These are not usually happy stories, if you can even find them.  I think my Dutch Reform ancestors were outcasts from the Netherlands (bad theology apparently).  In fact, most of my early ancestors on the North American continent crossed the Atlantic because of religious differences with the larger society they lived in.  Pilgrims (English), Quakers (English), Huguenots (French), and the aforementioned Dutch Reform (Dutch):  none of them were welome in their lands of origin.  Of these, the Huguenots on my tree were the latecomers, arriving in the early part of the 18th century. I know almost nothing of the Huguenot branch of the family.  They seem to have landed first in Virginia, some in what is now Loudon County where there are still people who bear some approximation of their name....

 I'm just going to slip this in:  I forgot to do week six due to a busy week.  Mind you, I'm not exactly sure what I was so busy doing, but it did seem to take up a lot of time. Part of the problem was that I wasn't sure how to approach "social media."  I'm a pretty steady consumer of social media myself:  I use Facebook and I occasionally check Instagram and Pinterest, but this is not particularly interesting.  Of course, these options were not available until the last couple of decades, so my ancestors were limited to letter-writing and the newspapers.  My mother's family did do a lot of letter-writing and a few of those letters are in my hands, but maybe more surprising to me is that they turn up in the social columns and occasionally even news stories in the Olympia Washington newspaper.  Thanks to Newspapers.com, I learned that my grandmother was a PTA president, that she got interviewed about the town clock, what people wore to my parents' w...

The sun set after 5:00 p.m. for the first time in several months just a few days ago!  This may not sound like a big deal to you if you live closer to the 45th parallel, but we are just below the 49th parallel here in the northwest corner of the United States and it is amazing what that extra few minutes of daylight can do for you.  (If you live in Alaska or Canada or Russia, or even Antarctica, you can stop laughing now.) This week's prompt is "Oops" and I have to say I have some doozies, mostly on my paternal side.  For one thing, those people kept marrying each other (generally a couple of generations apart) which makes untangling some of those lines challenging.  It is all too easy to mix up who is descended from whom, and how many times.  I just keep praying that no one is too close to their spouse.  But here is an early oops of mine that originated in a transcription error that obfuscated several questionable choices on the part of my ancestors: My pa...