Ancestral Musings

 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 ...