Mystery Monday: Grandpa on a Bench

Posted on by Kathleen

I’m still knee deep in organizing files and putting information back onto the database portion of the website. I thought I would post here the pictures I posted on my Facebook for family this weekend. It never hurts to get more eyes on a mystery so every once and awhile I post some pictures for them all to see if they remember or recognize anything! This weekend was a success because within 24 hours my cousin, Peter, had figured out where these pictures were taken. Not because he’d been there and recognized it but from some old fashioned searching!

The Pictures

What We Knew

  • The pictures were taken around September of 1963, because that’s when they were developed.
  • William and Llewellyn took many trips up and down the East Coast. As far north as Vermont (identified so far at least) and as far south as Key West.
  • You can see a partial view of the house from the first picture in the second and a partial view of the yellow house from the middle picture is shown in the right picture.
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Samuel Redford, the story continues

Posted on by Kathleen

What We Know

It’s time to start updating where my family research is at these days. I thought I would start with Samuel Redford. He was previously the first known Ancestor on my Redford line. I believe I’ve gone one more generation back now but there are still so many questions. For the first part. I still have no record of Samuel’s birth. I’ve gotten many different records through the General Register Office.

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March 17th

Posted on by Kathleen

Today is St. Patrick’s Day and so I thought I would look up March 17th in my family tree file and see how many people were born on this day. Turns out so far, only 2 in my clean file. In my old file there are 14. The most significant one for me to celebrate today is Llewellyn Thorward, my great-grandmother. Everyone who has been here awhile also knows her from my Diary of Llewellyn series.

This is Llewellyn’s 1899 birth certificate. You will notice that her name isn’t actually on it. It is her certificate however. Her parents names are there, their address is also correct. I also have that beautiful diary that chronicles three of her birthdays on March 17th 1923 through 1925.

Today I think I’ve decided to use Ancestry’s new Network feature to put together the people from Llewellyn’s diary. I have no idea what the new feature will do, but it would be cool to gather all the people together again and maybe upload some of those crowd pictures and try out the facial recognition search that was also recently released. You can be sure I’ll chronicle it here.

March 2010 is also when this blog was originally started. I was posting every single day for a long time and then it’s been sporadic for a long time now. May will be the 23rd anniversary of this website. Pretty awesome to think I’ve been sharing things here that long. I do wish I had been more consistent over the years but its very nice to have all these thoughts to look back on as I revisit a lot of my old research.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone and I wish you luck in all your searches today! 🍀

Identifying More Locations: Cypress Gardens

Posted on by Kathleen

I’m back sharing more slides from 1962!

We are in Cypress Gardens, Florida! Technically in 2025 we are in Legoland. Which I have visited with my niece and nephew and it’s very cool to see how Legoland is honoring the history of Cypress Gardens. There are call backs to the themes of the old botanical gardens. In fact its still a fully functional botanical garden.

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We Are So Back

Posted on by Kathleen

There is a mess, but I will clean it up!

Hey guys, so I’ve got everything back into place that I need to spruce the place up again. When I switched hosting companies before, I wasn’t completely happy with the behind the scenes functions. I’ve switched to Hostinger, and I’m loving it a lot right now. That said, there is a bunch of broken image links. What happened was the blog used to live at moore-mays.org/blog and now it just lives at moore-mays.org. That causes quite a lot of backend issues. I probably could have manually updated my backup file before uploading back to the site, but I definitely didn’t do that and that’s okay. I really wanted to take a look at things and organize other aspects as well. If you have a specific post you need up. Let me know, and I’ll move it up the priority list.

I’ve been doing a lot of new research and trying to do research reports for each line. So I am going to be updating here with all the new records and findings and adventures. Also the misadventures, because I’m very much an oops person. Mostly I really missed having this creative outlet. So I’m excited to fix the website up and bring her back to glory. I’d have to check the records, but I’m pretty sure we are over 20 years and counting for the domain name. My blog entries started in 2010. Granted, I have taken a huge break in the blog and I’m not putting myself in any kind of pressure situation. I’m just aiming to write here and if someone reads it, then awesome. I just want to get my research out to my distant and close cousins who are interested in seeing it.

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Word of the Day: Avoidance

Posted on by Kathleen

Definition: The action of keeping away from or not doing something

Well, that definitely describes me. Not only for today, but also for a long time when it comes to the Johnson line of my family tree. I actually need to be more specific, because I have a Johnson line on both my Mom and Dad’s side. Right now I’m talking about my Dad’s side.

The Johnson family on my paternal side.
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New Views

Posted on by Kathleen

Well, this is a little different then I imagined. If you’ve found me on the new URL before I’ve announced the change, Welcome! 

To make a long story short, things got complicated. 😂 This may be a temporary change or it might be permanent.  Either way, I’m going to work on organizing things behind the scenes for awhile here.

Identifying Locations

Posted on by Kathleen

Last time I posted, I mentioned I’m working on identifying some slides left to me by my Grandpa Moore. I’m going to share some of my identifications today. This has been a challenge for but also very fun. The challenge being that most of these slides are from the 1960s and not all of these locations exist anymore or look even close to the same. I’ll share how I identified them as I go.

1. Ca’ d’Zan

Photo 1. Llewellyn Thorward-Moore at Ca’ d’Zan in Sarasota, Florida, 1962. Photo 2. From the Ca’ d’Zan website, photo credit to their website.

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Still here

Posted on by Kathleen
Llewellyn Thorward-Moore standing in front of flowers.
Llewellyn Thorward-Moore, standing in front of flowers. Unknown location. Unknown time, but definitely a time before the internet.

Well, I’m still here, trying to get back into my genealogy research. I’m also dealing with quite a bit of internet downtime. So the frustration level is high. Then I remind myself, there are things you can do while the internet is down.

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