Classic Courthouses

I have to say that I really, REALLY love old courthouses.
Unfortunately, I lot of them have been knocked down and replaced by more modern structures.
Those I don't even bother photographing.
But when I see a nice courthouse dome or spire peaking above the trees in a town, I just have to make a detour and take a photo.
On our trip from Seattle to Minneapolis via US-12 we came across a couple of nice courthouses.






This is the Brown County, South Dakota courthouse in Aberdeen, SD. Built in 1904, it is a Renaissance Revival style building. I absolutely love that there are clocks on all four sides of the dome structure. I think the statue atop the dome is Justice, but am not positive. Forgot to bring my binoculars along!








At right is the Swift County, Minnesota courthouse in Benson, MN. It was built in 1898 to replace an earlier courthouse that proved too small to meet the growing county's needs. There are some old postcard images of this courthouse here.


Pity all county seats don't have such classic courthouses, isn't it?


The Book of Me, Week 2--Auspicious Beginnings

I am the third of four children. My father was active military until I was 9, so was gone for long periods of time. As such, there are very few photos of me as a child.
I'm guessing that the photo to the right is me, but it just as well could be my younger brother. We can't decide, so I'll pretend it's me.
My Mother told the story of my birth so many times that I started to feel guilty. Dad was stationed at Vint Hill Farms Station, near Warrenton, VA (at the time, a top secret intelligence installation) and they were living in nearby Manassas as there were no available family accommodations on base. The brilliant VA doctors decided that I was going to be born before the end of June, and they insisted that Mom give birth at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., about 50 miles away, due to possible Rh complications and the fact that my sister's birth was very quick. My older siblings were aged 39 and 17 months.
So.....the military "powers that be" made Mom stay in a guest house at Walter Reed for an entire month, waiting for my birth. All the while, she protested that I wasn't going to come until late July. My father would bring my older siblings to visit when he could, but that often turned out to be embarrassing for my mother, as (in her words) "They looked like little street urchins."
My birth itself was apparently uneventful. I was born on Friday, 23 July 1948. I have no idea what time of day or night, as there is no baby book or photo album for me.

SNGF: Spin the Ancestor Roulette Wheel!

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge this week is:

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to:
1) What year was one of your great-grandmothers born?  Divide this number by 125 (use a calculator!) and round the number off to a whole number. This is your "roulette number."
2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ancestral name list (some people call it an "ahnentafel" - your software will create this - use the "Ahnentafel List" option, or similar). Who is that person, and what are his/her vital information?
3) Tell us three to five facts about that person in your ancestral name list with the "roulette number."4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook status or a Google Stream post, or as a comment on this blog post.

My 4 great-grandmothers were born in 1871, 1873, 1873 and 1867. Divided by 125 and rounded to the nearest whole number yields the number of 15. What a surprise!

Number 15 in my Ahnentafel (based on me) is my mother's mother's mother, Nancy Jane COLLINS. I could write a book about her, since I've been absolutely fascinated by her my entire life.
1. My maternal great-grandmother was known as "Nannie" by friends and many relatives; she was "Mammo" to her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
2. Mammo was the only of my great-grandmothers that I ever met. She was born in 1873 and died in 1966, about two months before my high school graduation. After her last child (my grandmother) died earlier that year (late February), Mammo got her affairs in order and basically gave up on life. She announced that she "was ready to meet my maker" and went to sleep.
3. Mammo lived her entire life in Missouri, almost all of it in Hickory County. She did live a few years in Joplin, Jasper County, Missouri, where all three of her children were born, but the family returned to Weaubleau, Hickory County within 5 years. Later in life, her husband took a job as a guard at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City and Mammo moved there for a few years, once again returning to Weaubleau after the Republicans took over.
4. Mammo had fiery red hair that turned snow white when she hit her 80s. She always wore it in a bun on the back of her head. When we moved to Pennsylvania she came and visited us and shared a room with me. I can still remember watching her brush her waist-length white hair and the light of the street lamp glinting off of it.
5. Mammo was feisty and strong-willed. Once in the early 1930s she took over writing the Weaubleau "locals" column for the weekly county newspaper and regaled the men in the area who drank alcohol and didn't attend church on Sunday. She was relieved of her correspondent duties in short order!
6. Mammo never once spelled my name correctly. She insisted that "Ginny" should be spelled with a "J"!
7. I have spent countless hours trying to evaluate the accuracy of the stories Mammo told and the family history "facts" Mammo wrote about in her letters. While there's been a grain of truth in all of them, none have proven to be very accurate.

Cemetery Tours are FUN!

Today we had another great Seattle Genealogical Society cemetery tour, led by Amber Case and Lisa Oberg. This time we visited the GAR Cemetery on Capital Hill, just North of the much larger Lakeview Cemetery.

The photo at left is of the obelisk "In Memory of Our Heroes" that was erected by the Women's Relief Corps. All of the stones in the cemetery are flat, or at least relatively so. The original upright stones were re-set at a low angle many years ago.

There are some fascinating stories in this cemetery. Amber and Lisa shared a few of them with us. Not surprisingly, none of the Civil War veterans or their wives we heard about were originally from Washington state. Several of them took long, circuitous routes to get here, living in as many as 8 states en route.

I could easily get sidetracked by these cemetery stories; there are just so many of them that are absolutely fascinating. I don't know how Lisa and Amber make any progress on their own family research, given the amount of research they do for these cemetery tours. Thanks to both of you for a very pleasant and informative afternoon.

SNGF: 100 Words on My Most Interesting Ancestor

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seavers of geneamusings is to write a short 100 word story using the phrase "...the most interesting ancestor I have ..." in 100 words and then share it.

Here's my offering:

Robert Henry Collins is my most interesting ancestor...and my obsession! Born on 6 August 1849 in Benton County, MO to Henry W. Collins and his second wife, Susannah Bartshe, Robert was an only child with 14 step-siblings and another 14 double-step-siblings (children of his mother’s other two husbands). He married Rebecca Jane Campbell in 1872, with whom he had 5 children before she died in April 1882. Then he vanished. From newspapers I know he traveled widely in the West, living in Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Montana, occasionally returning to Missouri. He committed suicide in my great-grandmother’s smokehouse in 1924, age 75.

 

 

 

High hopes for a Brookshire Breakthrough!

I have been doing family history research for well over 45 years, beginning with helping my grandmother help someone else write a history of our part of the Boone family. My mother and I were working on her lines back in the mid 1970s. My mother's mother was a BROOKSHIRE, and try as I might, I haven't been able to connect our line of Brookshires to either of the two brothers from whom supposedly all U.S. Brookshires descend. There have been several well-researched books written on the Brookshires in the U.S., but those authors have either ignored our line or stuck them in the "uncategorized" section. It's been very frustrating. I cannot begin to count how many hours I've spent searching for and reading early records of east Tennessee and southwest Virginia trying to find my 3-great and 4-great grandfathers.
I've researched all of my great-great-grandfather's children and their lines. While Henry Clay Brookshire was married three times and had three wives and 6 sons, only 3 of those sons lived to adulthood and only one had a son who lived to adulthood and had a son. I did track that male Brookshire down, but he was totally disinterested in his family history and was outraged when I asked him to do DNA testing.
So a couple of weeks ago I went back to my Brookshire genealogy and stepped back another generation to Henry Clay Brookshire's brothers, sons of William L. Brookshire. William and Sarah (VARNELL) Brookshire had at least 10 children, 6 of whom were sons. I had identified a number of male Brookshire descendants of these men over the years, but have never been able to actually "find" any of them in real life. So I started looking again and amazingly found a son of a son of a son of James Houston Brookshire, the eldest child of William and Sarah.
Even better, I discovered that this 4th cousin of mine is on Facebook.
Eureka!
After messaging back and forth a few times, I told my new favorite 4th cousin about the sale that FTDNA is running on DNA testing and he agreed to YDNA testing. I am SO hoping his DNA will tell us which of the brothers we descend from, although the BROOKSHIRE group at FTDNA apparently only has 10 test results.
Hope springs eternal.

SNGF: The Rivers of our Ancestors

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver of Geneamusings is a particularly fun one for me, as a geographer.

This week, your Saturday Night Genealogy Fun mission is to make a map using the National Atlas map (at http://nationalatlas.gov/streamer/Streamer/streamer.html) showing the downstream course of a river that one of your ancestors may have traveled on.  What does it tell you?  What did you learn?  Did they live at other places on that river, or downstream of that river?  

Tell us about it in a blog post of your own (please show us the map you created - use an image snipping tool or take a screen shot), or make a comment here on this post, or write a Facebook status or a Google+ stream post.  

As I commented on Randy's blog post about the Streamer maps yesterday, I have some tangential ancestors in my SWICEGOOD line who went out to the California goldfields to get rich in 1850. According to one source,

“William Crutsinger and a company of sixteen left Knoxville April 3, 1850, on the riverboat Ellen White to make the cross-country journey from Independence to California. The group was made up primarily of men from “the upper counties of East Tennessee.” They reached the gold fields by the middle of August 1850 where their presence was reported August 23 by J. S. Wall of Kingsport who had arrived by sea about a month before. No account of their crossing has been discovered.” [1]

I’ve tried in the past to figure out what route that riverboat might have taken, but have not been successful. Streamer shows me that the Tennessee River, which flows through Knoxville, flows into the Ohio River at Paducah, KY, which then joins the Mississippi River at Cairo, IL. A riverboat could then chug upstream on the Mississippi to St. Louis, connecting to the Missouri River to near Independence.

 

Quite a trip!

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[1] Durham, Walter T. Volunteer Forthy-Niners, Tennesseans and the California Gold Rush. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville and London, 1997, page 105.