New Years Resolutions

While I generally to not make resolutions.. a few things to accomplish in 2009:

DAR
Colonial Dames
Research - Start my Grandmother's Scotland line.
Consider working toward certification.
Get organized and stay organized?
Get involved with local historical society - focus - cemeteries.
NO Blog fade :(

It's a start.

Christmas Memories

This was our second Christmas without my father. My step-father actually but the man that was my father in all senses of the word since I was a troubled 14 year old teenager. This Christmas was so much harder than the first that he was missing from. My mother, sister and I seem to sigh a given moments when the pause is one that he would fill. I am older, an adult and know people die but in truth it plain sucks no matter how old you are. I find that the moments of sudden teariness over missing him do not lessen and they still come at the strangest times like thinking about nothing on the commute home. I miss you Bill.. you were the best father a girl could have.

Christmas this year has brought me back to my childhood. Every year we would go to Akron, Ohio, where my great uncle (George Fender - middle in picture), my grandmother (Elizabeth Dewar Spalding Fender Duncan - right in picture), and great aunt (Edna Fender Naehring - left in picture) were the central point of our family and lived (Uncle George ran away to Florida for a few years). Aunt Edna, was the provider of house for the party and three branches of the family would converge on Christmas Eve in the early evening. I remember we loved to go but my sister and I would worry about Santa not coming if we were not home sleeping by the time he got there. Not once did Santa ever forget us I am happy to report. The first Generation there would be Grandma Willie (Willie Clay Moore Fender). She was George, Elizabeth and Edna's step-mother, their mother died young. Grandma Willie was the sweetest woman and I remember she was mostly blind and could see things if right up to her nose and big however she was pretty quick with a dollar bill to stuff in your pocket and she could move fast when she had reason. I also remember she was the "southern style green bean" chef of the house. They were delicious. She lived with my grandmother until she could no longer live on her own. The second generation would be my grandmother and her siblings, the Third Generation was my mother, her cousins Carol and Bobby. George's children did not come to this gathering as they were older and had their own parties. The fourth generation would be myself, my sister and five cousins.

While it was like any other family party, I don't remember anything bad.. this was a family that truly loved to be together and this was a night looked forward to year after year. The highlights were when Uncle George and his wife Aunt Stevie would come, they had moved to Florida for a number of years and I remember going to visit them there. George Fender was one of the more charming men you would ever meet. He was full of life and had this smile that was intoxicating. This younger generation could never get enough of sitting on his lap and hugging him to death. There was something truly magical about him from a child's point of view.

Highlights of these Christmas Eve gatherings:

The year Uncle George could not make it due to bad weather. Guess who showed up to a riot of happy outcries and a reunion like no other.

My Aunt Edna singing Christmas Carrol's with that beautiful voice, she quieted the room and brought tears to eyes.

My grandmother at the age of 50 doing a Highland Fling with such a beauty that you could see the girl she once had been.

My Grandmother, Uncle George and Aunt Edna singing Scottish tunes when they drank a little too much Scotch. They all came to the US from Scotland as teenagers.

The year the power went out. Out on the highway a car hit a telephone pole and the entire area when black on a very snowy night. Candles lit, everything quiet, snow falling, Aunt Edna's kitchen shut down, she went to the piano and we all sung Christmas songs by candlelight and that year to me was the most special of them all.. nothing mattered but that we were together and the occasion was marked to forever live in my mind.

Can you tell how much I loved my Grandmother, my Great Uncle and my Great Aunt? They were three of the more important people in my life.. while we all moved on to our own family traditions after their generation took ill or passed on still all of us in this family still long for those Christmas Eve's at Aunt Edna's. May you each know how much you are missed and loved.

Merry Christmas.

Getting my mojo back...

After an extremely crappy day and over stuff that I should not let get to me... really... I sit here at 9 pm irritated that I did not get my research back on the ball today as that was the plan. I am super tired right now and I suppose that has much to do with my current mood but now I am wondering where to start. It has been weeks since my research box was packed up for the move. I am still not settled in but I figure a box will get unpacked or decided on when I darn well feel like dealing with it. I want some sort of normalcy back and research is part of my normalcy.

And so... I suppose it is a matter of opening a box and picking a person to start on because invariably that is not the person I am working on within an hour because I follow leads or thoughts or ideas and find within three hours I am on the tenth person past the person I started on that research session. Haha.

When you are working on projects daily, you kind of have a memory of what you have been doing and what you are trying to do but it has been so long I am sure I will feel disorganized for a bit of time... so, I suppose I will jump right in and find my way rather quickly.. I think it is the jump that is the part that is taking the effort.. it will all be better tomorrow.

Tonight maybe laying in bed with the tv on is the ticket... I think I will give myself the night off and stop being angry with myself for not getting anything done today.

Small Hitch in the Getalong called "Moving"

Research has been scattered at best because I moved from one town to another. This will save me 90 minutes of driving today. Puts my daughter closer to her college, puts me closer to work and just makes everything so much easier. Too, I must make a small confession, one that I wonder if other Genealogists ever experience this. For a lot of years I had wondered and looked for George W Duncan and finding his death information sort of affected me in a way I was not prepared. I felt elated that I found him and sad that he died so young. I almost dare to say that for a couple of days I was depressed about him and maybe in mourning over finally finding how he ended up? Silly but he had been such a focus for me. I am hardly done researching him but he was a brick wall and now the wall is crumbling.

The town my daughter and I have moved from is small, very small. It is in apple country in western NY state, bordered by Lake Ontario on the north town line. Maybe about 6000 people. One grade school, one middle school, and one high school. One very small grocery store, two gas stations and one traffic light at the village four corners. I stayed there to keep my daughter in the same school district until she graduated. She has done every grade in that school system. Patiently I have waited for this to happen, her graduation would free me to move off to do and live where I want to. Never did I feel it would be so hard to move from that little town. I know I have lived there for 16 years but I was never a huge part of the community. I never considered it a permanent place but maybe time did that for me.. made it a home that I did not realize that it had become.

So the last drive from my old town to my new (and I am sure I will be back there on occasion for things.. like apples!!!) I passed by odd things that made me sad that would not be part of my routine anymore. Funny how that happened. There is this cute house that I would have bought if it ever went up for sale and it never did so the owners feel the same way about it that I do obviously, haha. Well every morning the lady of the house would be sitting at the kitchen counter drinking her coffee and reading her paper. The road in relation to that spot in her kitchen was vi sable and so every day I would drive by and see her sitting there. Oddly, when she wasn't sitting there I wondered if she was sick or had the day off (no, I am not a stalker). Without realizing it this had become a small routine. So I started to pay attention. I did the same with the tiny cemetery that sits out in the middle of nowhere. It is next to a farm house so obviously the old farmstead family cemetery. It needs work, there are tombstones at such an odd angle I am amazed they are off the ground at all. I wonder who takes care of it, if anyone has recorded that cemetery. Maybe I will get back there and find out some day.

So there seemed to be a lot of little things in my daily drive that made me realize I would miss my long home that I didn't think I would miss.. Now I start anew, I am going to join the historical society here and looking at the application I will volunteer to be a greeter and to do cemetery work. It should be fun.

Here is to new adventure. :) Now to get organized and get back to research work but first.....

Has anyone seen my coffee cups!!!! I need coffee really bad....

George W Duncan

I will admit it, I am a hopeless romantic. I will never know the day to day of these couples that I research. I will never know if my great great great grandparents loved each other or were married because it met other needs. I will never know if George looked at Jane Edwards and just knew she was the perfect woman for him. I am sure I will wonder the same on every branch of my family tree. What were they like as man and wife.

George has been hard to track down. I knew he and Jane were not together for long as she is on a few older census' living with one of her sons. I assumed he died but for the life of me could find no mention of him anywhere in North Carolina where she was born, lived and died and where he was born. I did find one census record of a George W, about the same age and in Texas living with a large family of a different name. When I saw this I wondered, "Did he up and leave North Carolina?". Then the questions.. if that is him, did he leave them, did he go to Texas to find a good life for them and tragedy struck so this was never fulfilled. What kind of husband was he really? I didn't want to think that was George but it might be, things happen in life and not always as we like or plan it.

I posted before about finding by accident a widows pension application document that Jane Edwards Duncan had filed. I hoped to find some sort of information on him. The envelope came from the North Carolina Archives and Records Section. In it was a Widow's Claim for Pension for 1885 and a Widow's Application for Pension filed in 1901. These documents gave his service information and that he did fight in the Civil War. Skimming through the documents I realized there was another document with these two. They sent it along and I didn't even know this book was there. It is "North Carolina Troops 1861-1865 A Roster" compiled by Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr. Volume VII Infantry, 22-26th Regiments.

Page 289, Co. G, 29th Regiment N.C. Troops.

"Duncan, George W., Private
Born in Ashe County and resided in Yancey County where he was by occupation a farmer prior to enlisting in Yancey County at age 29, July 26, 1861. Died in hospital at Knoxville, Tennessee, June 20-27, 1862, of "diarrhoea." "

He died so young and in Tennessee which is why I have been having a hard time tracking him down in North Carolina! I was relieved in a way, I am so glad he was not the George W. Duncan found on a census in Texas. While I hate that his wife hardly had a life with him before he was taken away from her, I am glad he didn't up and leave for Texas, never to be seen again. Yes, I am a hopeless romantic...

DAR and Colonial Dames

Here I go attaching my swing to another branch of my family tree..... *what else is new.. too much information, it is tooooo exciting*

About 20 years ago, my mothers cousin was helping her join the DAR and the Colonial Dames then I was going to join. The applications were all filled out. Patsy was a Registrar for the Colonial Dames and then the forms were put away and the process was not completed. When I picked up the family history again I decided I should do this and started some research trying to figure out who I had to prove as my mother was going to join on Patsy's registration numbers so I had none of the documentation myself, nor did she. When I mentioned this to my mother she said she had all of this information and it was in the safe. I said, "Mom, I just went to Virginia for a week to find all this information and it was in your safe?" And so I sat to look at the applications and they are quite a few. For the Colonial Dames we have John Sturman, Sr, Lt. Patrick Spence, John Sturman, Capt Thomas Youell, Thomas Sturman, Capt Thomas Youell Sr. For DAR we have Richard and James Luttrell and also on the British side we have Tom Cowden of Tennessee. So it looks like I will be busy gathering all of the documentation to connect to these ancestors so that I might apply to join these Organizations.

More to add to the to do list!!

Yipes, as the Township Turns - Edward Wilson and Dolly Briggs

My research is in its beginning stages but I did find that Edward was married to Rachel Silver from Maryland and they had a lot of children. He and Rachel were together on every census I can find, the last being 1870 and they lived with one of their sons. Dolly's four children were born within the same years Rachel's were. One born 1812, one born 1813... you get the idea.

So now new questions, IS Edward the father to any of the Briggs children? Was Dolly so in love with him that she accepted him as is as "life partner" seems to imply? Did Dolly live fully devoted to him and spurn any other mans attentions? She must have known about Rachel, did Rachel know about her? Did he love them both, did he love either? And all those children.... if all of them are his, he was a viril man and it does put his nickname of "Big Ned" in a different perspective? I know, I digress, don't groan so loudly. :)

When I first started looking into him via ancestry.com I thought maybe Dolly had come with him and his family from South Carolina to North Carolina. Were they just age old friends?

It looks to be an interesting story but I find myself at a cross roads until I find something that maybe explains their relationship. At this point I don't think I can assume he was Mary Jane's father. I wonder what life was like for the Briggs children...