This Mother’s Day I spent some time showing my Mom how cool Google Lens could be, and I quickly identified many pictures from my photo archive. Here are some of the pictures we identified. The first location is from the set of 1960s photo slides. All the other locations I believe to be taken in the 1920s!
Location 1: Former Best Western. Currently Holiday Hotel and Resort, Holiday, FL
Image 1: William and Llewellyn slide. Image 2: Best Western Postcard from eBay.
Image 1: William and Llewellyn slide. Image 2: Street View in Google.
Location 2: Union Station, Washington DC
Image 1: November 1923 Image 2: Google Street View, Aug 2022
Location 3: Memorial Amphitheater, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, VA
Image 1: November 1923 Image 2: Google Street View, October 2013
Location 4: Monomonock Inn, Caldwell, NJ
Image 1: Llewellyn’s Archive, year unknown. Inn demolished in 1940. Image 2: Vintage Postcard
Location 5: President Grant Tomb – New York City, NY
Image 1: Llewellyn Archives, possibly 1923-24. Image 2: Library of Congress image from the Hudson River, 1909
Trying to get a Google Street View image of President Grant’s tomb felt pretty impossible. With all the foliage and having to stick to the road patterns, I wasn’t able to get a clear view.
I hope seeing these image comparisons is as fun for everyone else as it is for me. I really love to put some context behind these images. In case you’re wondering how I know exactly when Llewellyn visited some of these places. That would be the Diary of Llewellyn of course. 😂 November 3rd and 4th, 1923
In my previous post, Word of the Day: Avoidance, I lamented that I have never really made progress with my Johnson family. I found a new to me resource that gave me the push I needed to go ahead and see what I could find.
NYS Historic Newspapers
I am loving the efforts of libraries and archives to make their collections more accessible. They are already fighting such a battle daily for funding and support, so anything that ends up being online, and free (!!) is an amazing accomplishment. I sent a donation by the way, because this site is truly amazing.
The NYS Historic Newspapers website is honestly really amazing. You can choose by county and then it will show you all newspapers they have and what years they have. My interest is Suffolk County for the Johnson family. I really want to know what was going on in Babylon, New York. My luck was on my side as they had South Side Signal which was a paper in Babylon from 1869 through at least 1920. 1920 being the last year they have issues online for.
Once you choose the paper you want to look at, you can then search the entire paper for something, which I believe is OCR searches. (I might be wrong, wouldn’t be the first time. 😅) When you go into month, you can also just search the month. Unfortunately for me, there was an advertisement for a Dr. Clark Johnson’s medicine. So my search results are a mess, I probably should learn the tricks on how to exclude those. If possible anyway.
Using the one trick I do know, I searched for Arthur, just to see if I could narrow down my results and I did! I want the 1880s so that left me with one result. Well, better than zero. Maybe the 1890s will be helpful too.
This is my one result from the 1880s, which is announcing Arthur’s death. I’m not sure who the Arthur Johnson is in the 1917 articles, but I will have to keep it in my pending folder for another day. Right now, I’m trying to focus on Arthur and his family. Always in the back of my mind, I have the one clipping on Newspapers.com as well.
This is a few years before his own death so this made me naturally curious to see if the South Side Signal would have mention of the deaths or even obituaries. There were 135 results for Johnson on my search results and the majority of those were for Dr. Clark Johnson. 😐 Never fear, I have Spotify and a healthy patience for paging through newspapers. I will side note here…
Side note: I understand that I need to look at each page of the paper, and see if there are other mentions. However, this paper has a section for birth, marriages and deaths reported in the town. In fact, they put instructions for it on the front page of the paper regularly for a very long time. I made a decision for this task, I was just going to check the one section for anything for my Johnson family to at least establish a clearer timeline for events. Some issues of the paper are very hard to read and faded, so it was really an eye strain issue in the end, but also I hope it was a practical one and not just lazy on my part.
There is a state wide death index for New York that spans 1880-1956. I decided to use FamilySearch to narrow some Johnson results by Babylon in the 1880s. Again, I’m just trying to narrow things down here. The plan was to hit the results of the index search and then go through the time frame needed page by page. I could be doing this the hard way or the wrong way but it’s definitely my way. 😂
My Results
I worked first from this index, then I’ve paged issue by issue from the papers first issue. Which was July 7, 1869. I’m up to 1885 now. 😂 Still going as I write. Of course all this is not written in permanent marker, but now I have certificates I can order, which will take me awhile, because New York State is currently backlogged by 4 years. 😅
This is where I currently stand with the Johnson now. Some of the announcements did specify some of the children as child of Arthur and Ann Johnson. Others did not. Mary’s a little trickier. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, probably I did. She disappears from her husband’s household after the 1910 census. In 1915 and 1920 the children are at the same address (838 Hendrix Street, Brooklyn) as before with their father. In 1920, her husband Robert Moore is even still listed as married. However, his 1925 death certificate, with his oldest child as informant, lists him as a widower. Then the 1926 Caldwell, New Jersey city directory, listing Robert’s death also shows a Mrs. Robert Moore living at the household. This is almost a decade before Robert Jr. will be married and he lists that 1933 marriage as his first. Then in the Moore family plot records for Evergreen cemetery it lists Mary Moore as being buried in Brooklyn on September 7, 1945. This is 20 years after Robert Sr.’s death.
So just color me confused. 😂 I’ve ordered the death certificate for a Mary Moore who is the right age, died September 4, 1945 in Marcy, New York. This happens to be the same location as a State Hospital. Is it a shot in the dark? Yes. Did I send the request 2 years ago? Yes. Am I still waiting? Also yes. Like I said New York State has a backlog. I’m about halfway through my wait allegedly, but at this point, I’m hesitant to send anymore requests. Its really a crazy thought process. I’m hesitant to send when I don’t even know if I’ll receive the first request, but I also feel the need to get the long wait started. For now I’ll sit and ponder it some more.
Anyway. Long story even longer. This was my weekend spent with the Johnsons. 😂
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.
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.
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! 🍀
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.
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.
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.
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.
