Just Who Are these People and Why Can’t They Be Found?No family of mine is shrouded in as much obscurity as the LeJays. Talk about your brick walls! These folks are behind a lead wall of secrecy. My LeJay connection is this: around 1860 or so, in De Soto Parish, Louisiana, Syntrilla [sometimes rendered "Centrilla"] [...]
Palo Alto, California–In the VA Hospital here nestled in the hills, I’m watching my father sleep. It’s the day after the call from my mother: “Your dad had a stroke . . . .” Fortunately, it’s looking to the neurology team, many of whom also work at nearby Stanford University, that it was a mild [...]
Superb New Finding AidLast night as I was surfing the ‘Net, I happened on a site that led me to a place called ArchiveGrid.org. I’ll let ArchiveGrid explain itself: ArchiveGrid is an important destination for searching through historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in archives around the world. Thousands of libraries, museums, and [...]
“They Got Some Crazy Little Women There . . .” So said Wilbur Harrison famously of Kansas City. Maybe that’s why William Edward Gines (1898-1955) forsook his native Shreveport and headed north in 1920. Once in Kansas City, though, he married Sarah Green who had also come from Shreveport. That lasted less than six years. [...]
George Bowie I got an inquiry from a researcher through my cousin Steve Bowie. The researcher was looking for a George Bowie. I happened to have some info on a George Bowie that was what she was looking for. Here’s what I had:George Bowie married Cordelia McWright on 30 Nov 1893 in Winn Parish, Louisiana, [...]
Does this mean something useful? You recall that my great-great grandmother Matilda Manson moved with her son Otis in 1884 from Hootenville, Georgia, to Milam County, Texas. And I had always wondered who she knew in that small community to draw her there. Later we learned that she went because her presumed paramour George Preston [...]
It Pays to Re-visit Old Research! One of my earliest discoveries in my research was finding Jane Manson, my 3rd great-grandmother, and her two daughters, Matilda (my great-great-grandmother) and Mary, in the 1850 federal census of Talbot County, Georgia. After that discovery, I continued to study the 1850 census for several months without further results, [...]
Continue reading about Tracing Charlotte Manson’s Descendants in Georgia–New Discovery
For reasons too complicated to explain, the Bloggcast Center has been operating on a prehistoric dial-up system for the past eight weeks. This has severely inhibited our ability [and our motivation] to work in this space. Today, I happily report, we return to the 21st century! Anyway, while we were stuck in the seventh ring [...]
