Author: Kathleen

Local Flavor: Historic St. Mary’s City

Posted on by Kathleen

One of the things I’ve longed to do with this blog is to talk about my local history. I’m not an expert, despite having lived here my whole life, but I’m fascinated by it none the less. This weekend, I needed to get out and relax a bit and my mother felt the same way. It had been a long time since either of us went somewhere just for the heck of it, without a shopping list in hand or goal in mind. So we just got in the car and drove around. It reminded me of the age of a lot of the historic sites around me. I know Jamestown and Williamsburg are very popular historic cities, but I wonder if many people realize St. Mary’s City is one of the first established cities in America. In fact, it’s easy for the citizens, like myself, to even forget the magnitude of history we’re sitting on in our county.

Maryland’s First State House (1676), reconstructed
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52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History: Movies

Posted on by Kathleen

Week 12: Movies. Did (or do you still) see many movies? Describe your favorites. Where did you see these films? Is the theater still there, or is there something else in its place?

Movies are probably the thing I’ve loved the longest. We’ve always been a movie family. We celebrate birthdays and holidays by having movie nights. My first job was actually working with my Mom in a locally owned video rental store. That store eventually sold their business to Movie Gallery, who subsequently got rid of all the stores. That’s alright, the video rental business isn’t going to be around much longer. Everything is going digital and I guess our original owner was smart enough to get out while the getting was good!

Yes I even made a scrapbook when I was leaving, I wanted to remember my special friends! Sadly, a lot of my regular customers are no longer living so it’s really nice to have a piece of them still with me!

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They Hate Me, I Know It

Posted on by Kathleen

I’m pretty sure my ancestors hate me. This may be going out on a limb, but I really think that the Mays family did everything they could think of to be very deceptive about who they were and what they were doing. I’m not going to feel guilty about all the attention I was giving my Dad’s side of the family now. I’ll probably annoy you with the amount of rants I’ll end up posting here while trying to figure out the Mays line of my family tree. In fact, I’m debating setting up an Elliott/Rowan County genealogy file. I’m tempted to just go through all the available records and map out the major surnames. They’re all in my tree somewhere so it may even help me later down the line. It’s just so confusing trying to find the right people when they were all named the same thing at the same time. Last night, I had a first for me though.

That’s two death certificates for the same person. Here’s where things go squirrelly. The death certificates give different birth dates. I actually had recorded the May 28th date into my database as the preferred date because that’s the date that Walker gave on his WWI Draft Card. I’m confused that there are completely different causes of death on each certificate. If that wasn’t enough, there are even different dates of death. I’m wondering why his hometown would have a death certificate done when he most likely died at the hospital in Boyd County.

So here’s yet another reason why I am beyond frustrated trying to sort out the Mays family.