Working on Genealogy for Someone Else & Finding Surprises!

It's interesting what I find myself involved in sometimes when working on genealogy.  You just never know whom you will interact with and why.

I am a member of the Find A Grave community.  This is a website that catalogs cemeteries and records whom is buried where.

There are many older cemeteries up in my neck of the woods and I've documented quite a few people in a cemetery in Saint Johns, PA.  Including this one........

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/112278362/harry-p-balliet

Harry P. Balliet, someone who died as an infant in 1892.(He's listed on the left hand bottom of this headstone(right side on the photo).

Back in January I received an email.  Here is how it began....

"Bom dia, Denise.

 

Tudo bem?

 

Prazer, me chamo Bruno da Silva Smith Filho e sou Brasileiro do Rio de Janeiro."

So I started reading(or trying to read)the email. WTF? It looked sort of like Spanish but not quite.  Then I saw "Rio de Janeiro" and realized it was written in Portuguese and was from Brazil!

I went to good old Google translate to decipher the message.

It seems this gentleman, Bruno da Silva Smith Filho, is Brazilian and he is looking for information on the Smith family.  Harry Balliet, the infant, had an older sister, Florence Balliet, who married Arthur Ray Smith, a veterinarian who worked in this area of PA.  Florence and Arthur had a son, Arthur Balliet Smith, who died in 1970.

Florence and Arthur are Bruno's 2 x GGrands and Arthur B. is his Great Grandfather.  After WWII Arthur B. had immigrated to Brazil so that's how Bruno's Smith line came to be in Brazil.  Florence and Arthur R. also had a daughter, Bette Lorraine Smith.  

Bette married in 1944, in Palm Beach FL to Kenneth Shergold, an Australian resident and 11 days later they flew to Australia to settle and raise their family.  I found an obit for Kenneth that listed additional relatives of his in Australia, including a daughter(who had also passed away), 6 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren(who most probably are all still living).

Bruno wanted to find any lost branches of his family who he assumed were in the USA.  He didn't know there was only one branch beside his own left and it was in Australia!  I supplied him with whatever little information I could from here about his Australian relations but tracking down his living relatives there would be on him as I had little access to information on living folks in Australia other than information I could find in an obituary.

He also wanted to find his great grandfather's birth certificate from the US.  I had to let him know the image for it was not online, just the data from it but he'd have to contact the state where Arthur B. was born, Nebraska, for assistance and I gave him the website link.

Not knowing if Nebraska officials would mail the records to Brazil for Bruno or not, I offered to have them mail it to me, within the US and I'd forward it to him via USPS Priority mail.

We had a couple of back and forth emails but he stopped replying to me a few months ago.  I guess I'll email him once more to see if I can lend any more assistance with obtaining the birth certificate.

I just think it's amazing how I got up one morning and found an email out of the blue, from Brazil, written in Portuguese from a complete stranger related to a long dead infant who I catalogued the gravesite for on a website of cemeteries.  Every family has twists and turns in their ancestry, some more than others.

Who'd a thunk it! ;-)

Sluggy

What Have I Done!!

It all began innocently enough.

I saw on Facebook that a distant cousin in the lowlands of South Central Virginia had died recently so went to make her a memorial on FAG.  Saw that the person who put the memorial up for her Husband a few years ago entered his death date wrong, so I sent her a message in case she missed that typo and wanted to fix it.

She emails me back that she is no longer an active member of FAG and can't edit the memorial or any of the memorials she maintains.
Thinking it was strange that she didn't email FAG admins. and ask for them to take over the memorials I told her I'd gladly keep-up the maintenance on her memorials if she wanted to transfer them to me.

LOLOLOLZ!!!!!!!

A few hours later my email program blew up!

Did you know that when someone transfers a memorial to your care you get an email from FAG letting you know?
This person had over 400 memorials in her name.
So if you sent me an email and are waiting for a reply it might take me awhile to wade through my overfilled inbox at the moment. lolz

Oh well, this will be plenty to keep me busy over the Winter when I am trapped indoors by the snow and cold.

I've already found a long lost distant cousin among her hoard of memorials.  She didn't have a last name for poor Mary Alma's memorial. Mary Alma was married twice but not buried with either hubs but I found that she was buried near her brother and his wife and we have given her a proper slew of last names(both married and maiden).  And now her actual place of burial and correct birth date are out there for all her descendants to find.

I look at it this way.....it's not a (paid)job, it's an adventure back in history!

Sluggy

Organizing Work...Boring but Necessary

Nothing much exciting to talk about today.

I took a ride out to visit "Joshua" at the cemetery in St. Johns PA yesterday.
Actually, I went to snap some photos of headstones, both photo requests on F.A.G. and just random stones to put up memorials for on F.A.G.
And Joshua snubbed me....humph!  He must have been up late partying the night before.

I found at least 9 headstones for requests(I may have found more but I need to go through and edit my photos first).  I also found some relatives of the requests who didn't have memorials up on F.A.G. yet, which may make the people who requested photos happier still, as they be long lost relations.

A few of the headstones were very worn and all the details aren't readily readable.  I found this video of a guy who uses flour to bring out the etching in old unreadable headstones....

 

If you read the lengthy list of comments on that video you'll see the flour method has pros and cons and it's use is not widely recommended.  I may have to get a blacklight or laser flashlight to keep in the car as those doesn't seem to harm the headstones and can aid in reading the markers.  It doesn't help that my eyes are old and getting weaker too.

Anyway, today I'm editing photos and uploading them to F.A.G.

I also found an interesting real estate property on the road to the cemetery that is for sale.
Check it out HERE.  It needs gutting basically but it's a nice piece of property in a low tax area and it's right across the road from a creek and it's going for pennies.....mostly because it needs a whole house redo.
But we could buy it for cash and work on it at our leisure.  Of course that would mean retiring up here in the snowbelt but then there is always RV living out-of-state for the winter months.
It's a moot point unless I can get an agent to SHOW us the house!....which no one seems to want to do.  You would think with the housing/real estate market depressed as it is, agents would be returning my calls without haste to get me inside this house, huh?
Not so.
I guess the commission on a $40K property just isn't worth their effort.....

I also cleaned out my Yahoo mailbox earlier this week.  1500+ emails gone!
I unsubbed from many email firms there and dumped a bunch of spam and unwanted mails.
Then I set up some new folders and moved about 300 emails worth keeping.
I am left with 10 emails to deal with in the old inbox.
Go me! lol

I don't access my Yahoo mail much anymore.  I don't remember what led me over there to my inbox but I'm glad I went because I found out something interesting.

Yah see, when I got this new computer with Windows 8(STILL hate W8!), the Hubs couldn't sent up my email server into the Windows program so that my incoming mail goes into my inbox.  He had to sent up a folder in the email program for my server addy and all my incoming mail from my server comes into that folder, not my inbox. (We have a "pop" email account and W8 doesn't support that any longer?)  It's too confusing for me to explain better or even to understand.....I just know that it "ain't right".

Over the last couple of months, since being on this new machine, I've sent out emails to folks.  Now there is still a feature on this machine, through Windows 8, that hooks to my yahoo email account.  I just discovered, by going into my yahoo inbox, I have replies to emails I sent out that I never got responses to in my reg. email server account I use...which is where I thought I had sent these emails from.  Somehow, it seems, when I sent emails on this machine to these persons, the computer used my yahoo email account, thus the replied to the yahoo email.

One such person I never got a response from was Tanner....well she DID respond but I never saw the response as it went to my Yahoo inbox.
Evidently, I hit something on my computer and instead of sending some emails out through my regular server it brought up a blank email form through the yahoo account.
So I apologize if I never responded to your response to me, especially to Tanner.
I'll be emailing you later Tanner about what we were corresponding about....I haven't forgotten you! ;-)

It truly sucks being a technology halfwit and have I told y'all how much I detest Windows 8 yet?? 8-))

Speaking of Yahoo, some day I'll have to tell y'all the story about my Siamese twin Asian email sister on Yahoo.
It's a hoot of a story.

Oh!!!
One more thing to say.......
I got my testing kit yesterday in the mail.

 

I'll be brushing the inside of my cheeks today and sending off my dna to be analyzed tomorrow.
I'm so excited to see what comes up as far as matches(if any)and what it says about my ancestry.
Knowing my luck, it will tell me I am descended from Nordic ancestors and Monkeys, none of which is correct......that I know of.......!

Has anyone else out there taken the first step into the Wide World of Genetic Testing for Ancestry?

Sluggy

Where the Past & Present Intersect

I went out today to get some exercise since the weather is not beastly hot like the past 4 days have been.
And where does Sluggy go to exercise?
A local cemetery to take pictures of headstones for F.A.G. of course! 8-)

Call me crazy but I find it relaxing to wander about a green space on a beautiful day and snap pictures of grave markers of stranger's dear departed relatives and ancestors.
It was also a nice drive down a windy country road into a very tiny town with a huge church and large gorgeous cemetery.  This area was a booming place, filled with lots of people back 100 years or more ago, so there are lots of little and some massive graveyards tucked away all over the place in this part of PA.
I signed up to be a volunteer photographer for F.A.G.  Somebody makes a request for a photo of a headstone for someone listed on the website and every volunteer within 50 or so miles gets an email alert for that request.
You wouldn't believe how many email alerts I get a week!  There are so many graveyards in this area it's crazy!  I think there are more people these days here living below the ground than above. lol

And there are very few people taking volunteer photos so I have a wide open playing field if I can find the cemetery.  Heck, I could do this as a fulltime job there are so many requests for photos.  Too bad the pay is lousy....ok, the pay is VERY lousy, as in, NO pay. ;-)

I'm making this my project-to document with photos and memorials on the website-this entire cemetery.
There are some memorials already listed on F.A.G. for this boneyard, but by no means is it complete.

By posting those headstones/markers on the Find A Grave website, it might help some other amateur genealogist track down a missing piece of their family line.
This is me, giving back for those who have helped me on my journey into my past.

I caught the caretakers out mowing today so I got a chance to ask about how the cemetery was sectioned off/mapped out.  He showed me the very VERY old pages of the graveyards layout with the surnames handwritten.  They have no files in a cabinet, no computerized lists....these papers are the only records for the graves!  They are so old and brittle and almost a medium brown in color from age.  This was no archival paper by any means when they were new.  I wonder what they will do when/if these maps ever wear out or get destroyed.  Hopefully there is another set of them tucked away in a safe somewhere.

These maps are very important information so I am not traipsing all over looking for a particular person's grave to photograph for a request from the F.A.G. website.

And to make my trips back there more productive, I was allowed to photograph the maps.  What a coup!
This will help me tremendously to get all the burial records up on the site that are missing.
Score one for this amateur grave sleuth..... ;-)

I took about 100 photos today so I am off to see which ones came out clear and start cropping and getting them in a folder, ready to load to Find A Grave.

I also had a very unsettling incident in the cemetery today.  I am not one to believe in ghosts and stuff like that but.....
I could have sworn at one point, as I was turning my head as I walked to the next headstone, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a figure dressed in a white suit, standing about 50 ft. away from me.  It was a shadowy figure and other than the cut of the pants appearing to be empire period style(hey! I'm an old costume designer....I know this shit!lol), I couldn't make out any distinguishing features of the clothing or the face.
I quickly turned and did a double-take and there was no one there.  And the hairs on my arms were standing straight up.....eeeesh.....

If it hadn't been a bright beautiful day, I might have freaked out.  But I was surprisingly calm about the whole thing.
So go ahead and tell me it was the hot sun playing tricks on my mind or Sluggy has been drinking or taking "funny" medications today or she's stressed out and just losing what little is left of her mind now.
I know I saw it.....so shaddup! 8-P

Sluggy

 

The Banjoes Are Calling Me....

Last week I experienced a flurry of genealogy activity.
The week before while noodling around on the interweb I found a library in Lynchburg, VA that has a wealth of genealogical information.
It's called the Jones Memorial Library.
They specialize in local history and genealogy.
Among their holdings are a large amount of local newspaper obituaries.

So I started poking around and came up with quite a few of my ancestors who had been brick walls for me.
I sent away for 8 obituaries at a cost of $80($10 per)......oh how I wish I knew someone locally who could have copied these documents for me cheaper!
This documenting family can get expensive ya know......

Anyway, they arrived very quickly via 1st class mail last week into my hot little hands.

All of the obits were informative and 1 answered a question my brother and I had talked about when he was here for the graduation, as we reminisced about long dead relatives.

The folks in question here are my maternal grandfather's family(my mother's father's side of the family) and/or folks who married into this family.
They lived in the central part of Virginia.  Yes, my mother's mother's family back during the depression was The Waltons, only a little further south....

My grandfather, Wirt Ross Harper, was the oldest son of Robert William Harper and Jennie Vie Tucker Harper of Campbell County, VA.  Wirt had 5 brothers and 2 sisters(in chronological order they were Ollie, Wirt, Royal, Lillie Vie, Robert, Raymond, Ernest and Tucker).
They were all born between 1907 and 1924.
Unfortunately I don't have a group photograph of all of this family.

The most important information I gained from finding these obit listings online was it narrowed down some folks death dates to within a few days for me, even if I didn't send for the obit itself, which also listed the day of the actual death and not just the day it was published in the newspaper.

One of the brothers I had the least information on was Royal.  He died when I was 4 so I don't remember him at all. His obit pegged his birth year(as it gave his age at his death....he was 49).
It also told me that he had been a veteran(as he died in a veteran's hospital), he had been married(listed his widows name, including maiden name), and where he was buried.
What it didn't mention was also telling too.....no surviving children, meaning he was childless when he passed. 
I went to put his information into my family tree on Ancestry and found a new piece of info. there-the application for a veteran's grave marker filled out by his widow in 1963.  This confirmed the military service too.

Now I have done an exhaustive search on Find A Grave for this family line over the past year, and I have never turned up a memorial/known burial plot for Royal in any of the cemeteries my other Harpers are known to be planted in. 
The obit gave me that he was buried in Smith Cemetery, which I assumed to be near Brookneal, VA, where most of this family group lived.
But a search on F.A.G. came up with no such cemetery.

A few days later I found the Campbell County Historical Societies Website.  They have a Project to find the "Lost Cemeteries" in the county and I found the Smith Family Cemetery listed as one of these MIA burying grounds listed there.
I also went onto F.A.G.(aka Find A Grave) and put up a memorial for Royal there and requested a photo from a local volunteer.  I did explain in a note with the request about the issue with where the cemetery was located.  There are 75 local photo volunteers and I am hoping one of them has a clue where this cemetery is or can ask someone locally they know, where to find it.
Cross your fingers for me!

This week's free time has been spent tracking down whether my mother's side of the family dearly departed are listed on F.A.G. or not, and if so, to request that their memorials be transferred to my care so I can link them all up and post more details or photos of them on the site.  So far I have 14 Baker/Vassar/Tucker/Harper/Foster/ ancestors under my wing now.  
I am having a devil of a time getting my grandparents out from the grasp of one F.A.G. contributor.  He does NOT respond to emails or his public messages or memorial suggestions/edits.  I've been trying to get these grands for months now and I will turn this over to the admin on the site very soon.  I suspect the contributor may be dead or infirmed and no longer active.  Why else would he ignore me?  If it comes down to a pissing contest, they are MY grandparents and not his....my mother was an only child so besides my brother, I am the closest living relative, and F.A.G. gives precedence to the closet relative for ancestors within 4 generations.

I would like to take a trip down to Virginia this summer to do some genealogical research at the Campbell Co. Historical Society/Public Library.  I see that they have TONS of research available on site to comb through.  I am at the stage of the game now that online census reports and such have been exhausted and I need official certificates and wills books and old newspaper microfiche now to continue the search.  Plus I'd love to go visit some graveyards in the area too and pay my respects.

I heard that one of my mother's cousin's wife is the unofficial Baker/Vassar family historian in that area, who has photos and such that I don't have and might have some written down stories.  I'd love to get together with her, as well as the cousin of my mother on her father's side who still lives in the area for additional information on the Harper/Tucker lines.

Maybe I'll take #2 Son on a roadtrip once school is out in just over a week.  He can help with the driving now and be my legs when mine wear out.  Oh, I KNOW the thought of spending time with me, a library and cemeteries will thrill him to no end......but if I keep him full of pizza and crap and let him sleep to 2pm, he might not complain too much.  lol

Anybody out there live in South Central VA((Farmville, Lynchburg, Appomattox areas) and want a house guest sometime next month?? 8-)





Sluggy

Recent Genealogical Hijinx

I haven't talked about my Genealogy obsession lately, so let's do that today.

I've spent the last few months assisting a fellow searcher, pardon the pun, dig up some information on his ancestors.

I signed up to be a photo volunteer on Find A Grave earlier this year.
If you sign up to take photos of gravestones near you, every time someone goes on FAG and asks for a photo to be taken and it's in your area, you get an email with that request.  You don't "have" to fullfill it but they send the request to you so you know another one has been made.

Back in July I received notification that a photo was requested for a headstone in a town nearby.
This was a cemetery I wanted to go poke around in but with it being the peak of Summer and the worse possible time for me to be galumphing through graveyards in the heat and humidity I just couldn't do it then.  Heck, visiting my own ancestor in OH in June in 90 degree heat about did me in! lol

The photo volunteers are not very active around these parts so I went ahead and emailed the gentleman and told him I'd give his photo a go but it would have to wait until the Fall but I wouldn't officially "take" the request so that if someone else wanted to give it a shot before I got around to do it, they could.

After we communicated and he was happy to wait on me, I went poking around his family tree.  He had a genealogy website for his many branches that I perused and then I went onto Ancestry to do some digging too.  The photo request was for a headstone for a young child.

This gentleman lives in England, as does the bulk of his family and ancestors.  Seems 2 of his great great grandfather's brothers decided to hop a steamer for the USA in 1880.  They settled near the area were I live today.  The records on their whereabouts/activities gets sketchy from that point.

Here is one of the few photos of the older brother I found from his passport on Ancestry.  This was taken years after he emigrated here and was found in a passport from when he went back to England to visit family around 1923.....

Plus this researcher in the UK didn't pay the extra $$ on Ancestry for access to the US records(the foreign records for him).  So I went about researching this side of his family.  I did lots of his grunt work for free since it provided me a learning experience and helped made me a better researcher, so we both gained something from the attempt.
I also was searching only from free records(aside from & outside of my ancestry subscription) and wasn't paying for any access or official documents, which made finding information that much harder.

One of the brothers who emigrated to the US married in this area and there is record that the wife gave birth to 12 children.   8 of them are known, but only 6 made it past childhood. I helped fill in with those 6 where they went/what they did/whom some married and he was able to find from there some living descendants of one of these siblings.....they only sibling who's line seems to have survived from either of the emigrating brothers.

Here's a photo of the younger brother with his wife and the 4 oldest children who survived infancy.  My friend obtained this photo from the surviving line of relations.....

2 big breakthroughs I made for him where finding the death record and the will of this brother who emigrated and I found out the identity of the woman he married and the family she was a part of.  He wanted to find the marriage certificate(which we still can't locate)as that's the 100% sure way to id the wife's last name/family.

But I found on the record of one of their children's baptismal church entry record of a sponsor with a different name, then I found that family, their migration/ship records/census records/where buried/etc. and all the evidence leads us to this sponsor being the wife's younger brother. 
And to go further, the wife's family emigrated from the same region of the UK as the 2 brother's my friend was researching.  This means he can connect with a whole other large family there in the UK.
As a bonus I found evidence that in the wife's family, most of her siblings left the US after a short time and set sail again for Australia, where quite a large contingency of this clan have flourished there as well.
My friend has gained a large number of new family from these discoveries!

When I was finally able to walk the cemetery for him to find this headstone, I turned up nothing.  Someone put all the burial records for this cemetery online, however 2 things made this a fruitless task....1-this cemetery is MASSIVE!  It's acres upon acres large and it's not laid out in any organized, methodical way.  It seems to be one of those that they just filled it up and added a new piece of land as they ran out of room.
This town back between 1850 and 1920 was a Boom Town for the coal mining industry.  It grew so fast and was a major city for it's time.  Once coal mining declined there the city fell into ruin and now it's a sleepy little rundown place with nothing but empty store fronts and crumbling buildings and a lot of people who for whatever reason can't/won't leave.  Needless to say there are few jobs and rampant poverty and despair there.  The city has lost about 60% of the population from what it was at it's high point.  Every census the population shrinks another 10% as the old people die off.

The cemetery is not well cared for either now.
Hubs and I were in there for 3 hours and we didn't even begin to cover it all.
AND 2-we can't find anyone in charge who has any kind of plan of "whom is buried where".  With a cemetery that large, it's a wild goose chase unless you can at least narrow down where someone is suppose to be planted.  Since this person we are looking for was an infant, and the family was young and didn't have much money, we think the grave may not be marked or have a headstone, in which case looking for one is pointless. If we could find a burial map, at least we could have the information of where her grave is located.

We'll continue to try to locate someone with the burial plans for the cemetery in question.  My friend was able to find out where the younger of the two brother ancestors is buried(the same cemetery as a sister of his wife I found out), so I told him I'd put a Memorial up for the brother on Find A Grave and put out a photo request, just in case there is a headstone for him. I'll request too, that they look around for any other headstones with the brother's surname, as well as his wife's maiden name to possibly find any more of her siblings or parents, if buried there.

I also connected with my 3rd cousin once removed on my mother's side of the family a couple of months ago.  I went trolling through some message boards and found a question from him on his grandmother's maiden name, which was my mother's maiden name.  I noticed too that he has a different last name and I was trying to track down an ancestor with that last name who married one of the sisters of my great grandfather.  It runs out we share a pair of ancestors born in in 1795 & 1805.  I also found we share ancestors as well through another family line, through his grandfather's surname, so we are related by birth and by marriage.
My cousin is retired and a generation closer to our ancestors and I've been able to connect him to the rest of the family lines, besides his direct descendant from our joint ancestral pair and he's been able to fill in some gaps/dates/names/details for me in his direct line.  Unlike most of the other researchers I've come across in this year who I share family with, he seems to want to be related to me.lol  Ok, that didn't sound quite right.....he wants to continue to have a connection with me, both as "kin" and as a fellow ancestor hunter.  8-)

You wouldn't believe some of the people I've run across this past year while doing genealogy!  Ok, if you've done genealogy you WOULD believe it....lol  There are plenty of researchers who won't share the information they have.  It's a hostile world really.....they guard their records and data and hoard their dead people.  It's madness I tell you, madness!  And if you DARE want to be friendly with someone who is related to you, well, that just isn't done.
Ass holes.....

Another brick wall that got knocked down for me was finding out the maiden name of my grandfather's brother's wife.
I remember this Great Uncle fondly, you may have seen I posted his photo for Veteran's Day in this post HERE.
I've just begun to research him and I had a post planned about him but that's for another time.

I remembered that his wife was named Edith but since I didn't have the maiden name or any marriage documentation yet I was laying awake at night trying to wrack my brain to recall it since I am sure at some point as a child I heard it.
But that just gave me a headache and made me lose sleep.
My Great Uncle had died young in the 1970's and I lost track of his wife.  I figured she remarried and might still be alive so I thought searching for her was pretty hopeless at this point with what resources I had available to me.


I had requested the transfer of the Find A Grave memorial someone made for this Great Uncle many months ago and they had never responded to my request.
About the time I posted about him for Veteran's Day, I got a notice that his Memorial on F.A.G. had been transferred finally!  When I went to look at it and put his photo on there, I found that someone else had taken a photo of his headstone and lo and behold!......Edith was there on the stone sharing his resting place and her maiden name was included!
Now I have that information and a new branch of the family tree to meander around.
And the funny thing I see now that I've poked around a bit in her family......Edith's mother is from the same family that my 3rd cousin once removed.....the one his grandmother married into.
Weird how this whole "who is related to whom" thing works, huh?

Sluggy