George Washington
By patti | July 2, 2008
Archeologists have long tried to find George Washington’s boyhood home at Ferry Farm. They believe they have finally been successful.
Topics: History | 1 Comment »
Sam’s Summer
By patti | June 26, 2008
For those of you who aren’t a friend of Sam on Facebook or didn’t follow his enigmatic clue as to following his summer exploits, you can read here. So far he’s posted his itinerary and we hope he continues to update it throughout the summer.
Topics: Family | 3 Comments »
Genealogy
By patti | June 21, 2008
Just found that I had never “published” this post.
I know someday when I write about genealogy, I will have to have better, more specific titles. I haven’t been doing much blog reading since I got back from the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. A few weeks ago, I started a home study course in genealogy from the National Genealogical Society. I am planning on becoming a professional genealogist, so keep me in mind if you are in desperate need of genealogical services in the future. 
Now I’m trying to get back into the lessons of the home study course, but so far lots of interruptions have thwarted my efforts this week.
The institute at Samford was fun. It is a beautiful campus. Attendees can stay in the dorms which includes being fed at the cafeteria. The food was fabulous. Not at all like the usual university cafeteria food that I have come to expect. The intermediate genealogy course I took is designed to introduce the many resources in different areas available to genealogists. This class is taught by Lloyd deWitt Bockstruck who is the supervisor of the genealogical section of the Dallas Public Library. Who better to know the best resources to use in genealogy?
I finally found a great program called Together to use on my Mac for organizing my genealogy files. It really would be great for organizing almost anything that where lots of different file types are needed. It’s a program where you can organize and categorize and tag your files as well as email and web pages. One thing that’s a problem in genealogy is how to file stuff. Some people use a geographical system where files name counties or states. Some use surnames, and some use file types (e.g., vital records, newspapers, county histories, deeds, probate). One problem with the first two systems is that you can have different surnames in one locale and more than one surname for a document. Being able to use tags and “smart folders” allow files to be in more than one place at a time. Not really, but that’s the appearance of it. They’re displayed in more than one place at a time. Together looks like an email program with folders on the left and files for a folder on the top (there is an alternate view of this) and then in the bottom section the file displays and is editable. You can double click on the file to open it in its native program. You can import files or you can just drag them into the program. You can have multiple libraries. Besides my “genealogy” library, I also have “household” library. Most file types are able to be displayed. The only one that doesn’t display in Together is an OpenOffice format file. However, even those I can save as the Microsoft Office counterpart so that it doe
Topics: Genealogy | 1 Comment »
Muliti-tasking
By patti | June 21, 2008
The Deputy Headmistress has a post on multi-tasking that is worthwhile reading. I’m afraid that I’ve been proud of multi-tasking myself, but there is a huge demand for it from mothers since we wouldn’t get anything done at all if we didn’t multi-task. Since it is something inherent in being a mother. I’m not sure I agree with the one quote the DHM used that said we were designed to focus and not multi-task. I actually have given this some thought, because I can see that after years of being constantly interrupted, it is harder for me to focus and concentrate. That’s a scary thing. It is something I’m fighting against. But then there is some mental work that goes into being able to attempt to retrieve thoughts interrupted when other things demanded attention. I’m not talking about the internet here or multi-tasking on web pages or email. Even though my kids are older, I have found that there are still a lot of demands on my time that are not huge things, but small things that have to be taken care of and tend to fracture my time. So it seems to me that it is a woman’s lot to have to multi-task, but maybe we ought to guard against an inability to focus and to concentrate.
Topics: Home | 3 Comments »
Busy, busy, busy
By patti | May 18, 2008
Thanks to all of you who visited and commented on my last post. Lorri, Ben will be living in Geneva. Hannah, I’ll email you about the math and phonics. I can only imagine how precocious your daughter might be.
I just got back from The Conference in the States in Kansas City last night. It is one of two major genealogical conferences held in the US every year. I had a great time and learned a lot. The night before the conference began I stayed with Memof6. It’s always good to have a local giving you directions. I had one of the easiest times I heard of making it to the conference location. And, as always, it was good to visit with the Memof6 and her children. …oh, and husband, too….although he was pretty busy fixing the lawn mower.
Topics: Family, Genealogy | 4 Comments »
Family News
By patti | May 9, 2008
I don’t usually post much about the family because some of them don’t like finding out that people they don’t know seem to know all about them when meeting them in other environments.
Last Thursday-Sunday, the girls and I went up to Indiana to visit Ben and one family we’ve known through the internet for many years and to do some genealogy research. It all was quite fun. I was very successful in my genealogy quest and found a probate packet that had its earliest receipt contained therein from 1835. A probate packet contains all the papers that were collected during the administration of someone’s estate when he dies. So people will submit bills owed by that person that need to be paid. There can be bills for expenses related to the illness just before death or burial expenses themselves. There can be outstanding bills from the store which will say “shoes for James”, etc.. Then there’s an inventory of all the property owned by the person (even if the wife is still alive!). The property is sold and a listing of the sale price and who bought what appears. Then the expenses are totaled and the assets are totaled and the remainder divided among the heirs which are all usually named. This can be an incredible goldmine of genealogical information besides the common everyday stuff one learns about the ancestor. (I debated about putting “ancestor” in quotation marks because I mentally went in the Bertie Wooster way of referring to his Aunt Agatha.) One reason the naming of the heirs is particularly valuable is because names of wives will be given with their married names. Often it can be difficult to track female lines because of the name change upon marriage. Probate records may be the ONLY proof of the parentage of a woman. Then if the son or daughter of the deceased has died, grandchildren will be named. Back then this happened a LOT. Well, anyway on to other family news (this was “family” news by the way–just not very recent “news”)
One reason we went to Ben’s in Indiana now is that he has started working for Caterpillar as an engineer after getting his master’s degree from Purdue. He’s now living in Illinois, but he’s making weekend trips back to Lafayette to fix up his house to get it ready to sell. We planned to be there on the weekend so that he would be there and we could visit the internet family while it was convenient to kill many birds with one stone.
The exciting news about Ben though is that he is going to be doing two rotations at places other than his “home” location and just found out that he will be based in Switzerland for three months while he gets to travel around Europe in the course of his job! How exciting is that???
Sam has been working on all the arrangements he needs to make in order to work for Berlitz at a foreign language camp in either Germany or Switzerland this summer. Unfortunately it’s very hard to coordinate everything, so things are still up in the air. He is going and has already bought his plane ticket, and has been offered a job as a counselor a camp over several weeks. But unless he gets the work visa, he won’t be able to work. It’s all in process, so we hope for a favorable result.
Jed is home after his first year at LeTourneau U. Abbie is doing beautiful things with her drawing and piano. Grace is doing more physical stuff in working with her (now) three horses. We’re all looking forward to the end of the school year, and I hope I don’t fizzle out before then.
Topics: Family, Genealogy | 12 Comments »
Fires and Bibles
By patti | April 21, 2008
I wonder how many old family Bibles were destroyed by fires. Supposedly one of my ancestors Clement Nance had a whole trunkfull of family papers that were destroyed by a house fire in the New Albany, Indiana area.
I recently received my first-ever-ordered pension packet on my Civil War ancestor Albertus Van Hoesen. With the price of copying the file, you get only the first 100 pages and you have to pay extra to get any beyond that. So Albertus’s was beyond that by 43 pages, and so I’m awaiting the rest. I’m planning on transcribing some of the letters contained therein. But one thing that’s interesting and why I think context is so important it that Albertus tells how he doesn’t have any proof of his birth because the family Bible was burned in 1878. That would have just been some little factoid in my brain without any kind of depth of understanding of the reality of it if I hadn’t read before that from the Clarksville Star newspaper about the house of R.C. Van Hoesen (who was Albertus’s father) burning down. (see post farther down).
Even the little, common place things are interesting.
Topics: Genealogy | 5 Comments »
Genealogy and Vacations
By patti | April 21, 2008
I’m a member of New England Historic Genealogical Society and today received an issue of the publication sent to members. In one article one of the directors in NEHGS tells how she enjoys hearing how people get into genealogy. She tells one man’s story of the influence his father had been in sparking his interest. His father lost many family members and subsequently this caused the desire to learn more about his family. The son remembers his father working at the kitchen table at night typing notes onto three-ring sheets. But this is the fun part (My Children, take note.)
“My father planned so many family trips around his research,” Bob recalled, that “until I was a teenager, I assumed everyone’s vacation included a visit to a cemetery.”
Don’t they??? Too funny! And I do think it’s interesting–and I tell this to people who wonder if my kids are interested in genealogy, too–that when we went to Harper’s Ferry for its historical interest, my kids asked if we were going to go to the cemetery there. Harper’s Ferry is a town built into a rocky hillside and the cemetery is at the top! I told the kids, “Well we don’t have anyone buried here.” And they wanted to go anyway. They did think it fun to find Mr. Harper buried there, although my recollection is that he either died soon after arriving there.
Even though we visited purely for historical reasons (although certainly the case could easily be made that genealogy would also be “historical reasons”), there is a place in the town section that is marked as being the location of the store where Meriwether Lewis purchased some items for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. We are related to Meriwether Lewis, although I don’t know exactly what cousin and how many times removed we are because I don’t have him entered into my genealogy program.
Topics: Genealogy | No Comments »
My response to a response
By patti | April 18, 2008
I was looking on the local paper’s Web site and ran across an article written by Mona Charon about why the public schools are failing to teach ethics or character. There were three replies, one of which was the obligatory, “Oh, if only parents were doing their job….” which seems is the stock answer for any criticism of the public schools. I wrote a reply but it is longer than the allowed character limit, so I’m going to post it here:
It always gets to me when those who criticize the public venues such as public schools are they themselves then criticized with “well, if only the parents would do it….”
Problem is for the last 50 years or so, the public school system and social workers in the government system tell parents that they know what’s best for kids. After all, they are the experts. No matter if their own children are hellions. It doesn’t matter because they have the degree or the credential. That’s what make them all knowing about these things.
Not only do we have the public sector telling parents-either implicitly or explicitly-that they know best, the public in general has been brainwashed with the current philosophy that there is no right and wrong. “What’s wrong to you isn’t wrong to me.” It is no wonder that parents have no bearings. But please don’t blame the parents. It’s not as if those teachers in schools have any better insight into teaching children, their own or the public, values or character. They’re the same parents who are probably not teaching their own children character at home. Parents and how they’re raising their children have been heavily influenced by what the experts have said over the last 50 years.
The reason the schools are doing the character training is because there is a problem. But that’s not the solution and I could have told them so and helped them save their pennies. Learning character comes from working and playing and living side-by-side with people of character and integrity. No one does that any more because the experts tell them it’s better to send their kids to day care and pre-school so that they can excel academically and socially—HAH! They offer up their kids character on an altar of academics that is only an illusion. They’re wrong, wrong, wrong. Common sense tells us so, but we can’t let common sense speak because it disagrees with the experts.
Topics: Education, Family | 2 Comments »
NARA Records
By patti | April 2, 2008
Yay, yay, yay! I just checked on the status of my order for the military records for one ancestor and the pension file for another, and they have been found, photocopied and are awaiting shipment. On my last order, they were “awaiting shipment” even after I got them, so I have hopes that they will be here within two or three days! (I could have put this in Facebook, but thought it was too long.)
Topics: Genealogy, History | 3 Comments »
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