Category: Uncategorized

Personal Genealogy Files Goals

• I want to finally finish re-organizing my ‘To Be Sorted’ folders on my second hard drive. Right now I have a folder of Mays photos, a folder of Moore photos, a folder of scanned photos and a folder of tombstones to be sorted into my 2010 filing system. (Hopefully it’s my final filing system!)  To be completely honest, I’ve been horrible and haven’t touched my ‘To Be Sorted’ folder at all since the last update. Oh gosh, what is my malfunction!
• I want to have the whole Mays side of my family entered into my website and both FTM and RootsMagic. This is a big feat, since I’m behind on my RootsMagic work and there are a lot of Mays family members. I’m pretty sure getting a RootsMagic file together is on the back burner for now. I’m mainly just entering people in manually so that I can have the ID numbers be the same, but my Family Tree Maker file is getting closer. The website is in progress at the same time as my Family Tree Maker file, with some small exceptions that I bookmarked in FTM. So that’s going as well as it can be. I’m determined now that the summer is over and the hurricane is passed, I will work at least three times a week on this.

Online Genealogy Goals

• Order at least 4 microfilm from the Family History Center. I’m hoping for one a quarter. I keep talking myself out of it because I want to get the most bang for my buck, so to speak. Enough of that! Time to get on with it! I still haven’t ordered any. 

Record Ordering Goals

• I want to obtain the marriage certificate for William and Llewellyn. (I have notations of the date in Llewellyn’s records and a newspaper announcement, but I would like a copy of the actual certificate)
• I would like to find the death certificate of Robert J Moore. (Brooklyn has no record of his death in 1925, so my next search would be Caldwell, NJ)
• I have a copy of Llewellyn‘s birth certificate but it might be in New York at my Aunt Diane’s house. I’ll have to ask Uncle Chris about it in July.
• Order death certificates for Lewis and Jennie Thorward.
• I am going to be ordering the first certificate this week. The birth certificate is not in New York (apparently), so it must be lost somewhere. Unfortunately, this means I’ll have to order it and hope they can find it. I do know her name wasn’t on my copy of the certificate, so I’m hoping this is possible. I didn’t make it to New Jersey for many reasons, and so that’s no longer a hold out for me. Hopefully Caldwell or it’s records aren’t under water after the hurricane.

General Goals

• BE MORE ORGANIZED! I ordered a copy of Elyse Doerflinger‘s Conquering the Paper Monster ebook and I plan to put it to use in the new year! With all that’s been going on in the last few months, I just haven’t had the time to touch my archives. I’m usually very good about starting and finishing big projects, it’s just I need a guideline sometimes. DONE. I am so organized it’s not even funny. My system is working beautifully and I know where to find everything when I need it. The only project left is to get my computer files finished.

Website Goals

• Don’t break the site! I’ve had a horrible habit of breaking the genealogy software on my website. Usually because I mess around with it too much. I think I’ve learned enough through trial and horrible errors to successfully keep this goal! DONE. I am still working on the new website but I’m pretty sure I won’t break the main site since I refuse to mess with it until the new site is done and beta tested.

Okay, so now I’m off to print out some order forms for the records I want to order. I’m going to fill them out and place them in my outgoing folder so I can do one at a time as I get some extra money.

Original Post | Update #1

The great news is that picture was taken the day after Irene hit and as of today, that pole has been fixed! We had to take a ride around the county today to check out the school bus routes. My mother’s was fine, but we took backroads on the way home and it looks like a war zone back there!

I’m very fortunate to live on the highway, so I have power and internet again. However there are many in the area who are going to be without for a while yet. We’re loaning out our generator and helping all we can and I encourage anyone who lives in an affected area to do the same. You’d be surprised at how much a hot meal or a hot shower can help people who are displaced or without power still. We were even debating making a big pot of chili and taking it out to the work crews. It’s a mess out there and they have some long, dangerous hours ahead of them.

I’m going to get back into my daily grind in a bit, but I wanted to take some time out to let everyone know how we fared!

 

As of 3:36 Sunday afternoon, I am currently without internet service. Due to the severity of the power issues in St. Mary’s County, I am unsure if my Diary of Llewellyn series will continue on September 1st.

I do have power at my house, thank you SMECO! However I don’t know if the Internet will be back in time for my entries to continue after the last day of the month. I usually write up two weeks worth of entries at a time. My current scheduled entries end August 31st.

There is still plenty of time for it to come back, I am just giving you advance notice of the situation. The way my life goes, the second I publish this entry, the internet will come back. If the Internet does not come back in time, I will just continue my one entry a day posting until we catch up. Heck I might use the nifty app I’m using to type this entry.

If you are a family member who regularly keeps up with Llewellyn’s diary, drop me an email at leeny.moore (@) gmail.com. I am going to start putting together a regular Word document transcription to share with family members who are also researching the Love and Thorward families. I just want to have a bit of control over who the diary goes out to.

Good luck and stay safe everyone who is dealing with this hurricane, she was a nasty one!

I made a decision and stuck with it, not like that whole not renewing Ancestry.com thing. (I may or may not have renewed it at 11:30pm last night. I’m weak.) After researching too many printers then I should have the other day, I finally found my replacement. I decided on the Epson Stylus NX625. At first I was going to get my first choice, but in the time I took to think about it and when I decided to get it, the website had taken it off sale. Having decided that happened for a reason, I went back to the drawing board and was going to get the Epson Stylus 420. Upon further review, I noticed that the 625 was actually only $20 more expensive and I knew I had $10 in reward points I could use. So I went with the 625.

Here are the things I like about it:

• It set up wirelessly so easily. It gave me a little trouble but I ended up hooking it up temporarily with a USB and setting it up. Once it was installed, I unplugged the USB, set up the wireless and nothing could stop me! All my computers now print to the one printer and I can have my desktop off and print from my laptop. That’s a big thing for me because I like to shut off my desktop and use my laptop when I want to actually focus on genealogy.
• The print quality is much better then my previous printer! I didn’t see anything wrong with my previous printer’s quality. However, the new one is much crisper and faster then the old one.
• The paper loading is much easier. There is a paper tray on the bottom that pulls all the way out so I can load the paper. My old printer didn’t have a tray. You just kind of laid the paper in place and hoped it was correct.
• Double sided printing. This is by far my favorite thing. I can print on the front and back of the paper without doing anything but clicking a box! It’s beautiful and marvelous and fantastic all in one.

There aren’t many but there are a few drawbacks so far:

• The price of the color ink is a bit high for my tastes, but so far I think it’s going to last longer then the old printer did. So I don’t mind paying a bit more. The high prices are even for the high capacity ink. So I have a feeling it will definitely be worth it.
• The SD card doesn’t automatically transfer pictures. I can manually do it, but before when I inserted my memory card into the reader, Windows would pop up and ask if I’d like to import pictures. So while this isn’t a deal breaker, it might mean I transfer pictures a little less.

Overall, I think I made a good purchase and I can’t wait to dig in and finally print out some things I haven’t been able to!

Note: I was not asked to write this review. I was not compensated by either company to write this review.

In November of 2010 I wrote up a post about how much I loved my Kodak ESP Printer/Scanner combo. Well, the time has come to replace my printer. I’ve been telling my family it’s gone “Skynet” on me. (Sorry for the Terminator reference, I’m a nerd.) I’m also hoping to take advantage of the back to school sales around town.

When I say Skynet, I mean it’s going absolutely crazy. It won’t print, it barely scans, and it won’t let me do any of the “maintenance” to try and fix it. It basically does what it wants, when it wants. Including shooting paper out at me. So I’m just done with it. I’ve had it for a couple of years, and I’m curious to try a wireless printer so I doubt I put my all into troubleshooting.

Continue reading “It’s time to research an Upgrade” →

As if life wasn’t hectic enough, the universe threw us for another loop. It’s really amazing how your perspective changes when adversity strikes. It really made me see how important the people in my life are. I know you can’t tell through the computer, but I’ve mellowed out so much in the last few months. My perfectionism is limited to my quilting and I go days, sometimes even more then a week without sitting at the computer for more then a half hour.

Last night I was in need of a break from my current reality. My sister needed it too. So we got into our pajamas, booted up our laptops and we had “sister time”. For us that means watching a movie and futzing around on the internet. She was trying to “build” a new car after hers was totaled on Tuesday and I decided to pick up my genealogy. Thanks to a bookmark in Family Tree Maker, I knew exactly where I left off.

It was wonderful. It was relaxing. It was the Mays Family! How is that possible? In fact it was so much fun that I decided to carve a few hours out of today for a little more. I guess sometimes absence does make the heart grow fonder because I was pretty fed up with deciphering the Mays family!

Do you want to know the even better news? I might almost be DONE with getting the Mays family re-entered into my database. I can’t say for certain because I have to research the leads I have on the other children of William Mays and Frances Adkins. Currently, I’m not putting them in my file or onto my website without some kind of documentation. So I might have a lot more, or I might be almost done. This genealogy thing is always changing!

I haven’t had much time for my genealogy lately. It’s the chaos of summer and quilting that has me busy as a bee. Hopefully things will calm down now that all the trips are done with and Grandpa is settled. I’ve discovered quilting really relaxes me so I’ve been working on that a little more then genealogy. I’ve got the itch to have a genealogy day soon though! My research didn’t happen this summer because of circumstances, so I have a little more time now to sort through my family files and get them straight. I’m still transcribing Llewellyn’s Diary, and I have an inbox full of emails to answer today. So don’t give up on me yet! It’s just a sign of summer.

You may or may not be wondering where I have been lately. It just so happens I’m on active jury duty. I finished up a trial yesterday and I’m free today, after that, only the judge knows!

In the midst of all this, my grandfather moved to Southern Maryland. So to say my life has been hectic would be an understatement! It’s all going good though, I just have a busy few weeks ahead of me. I’m hoping to settle back into my routine in the next week or so, or at least finding a new one. I haven’t had much time for computer related things. I’ve been falling asleep much earlier then I used to! I guess that’s the results of a busy lifestyle!

The great thing is that I’m getting plenty of stories from Grandpa. Even some new pictures!

Boy am I behind on everything! The good news is I had a blast with ‘The Aunts’. Which is what my cousin Summer and I kept referring to them as. Summer from Ohio, me from Maryland. It might take me a little bit to get back in the swing of things but I thought now would be a great time to pull out some of the search terms used recently by people. Hopefully what landed them here was close to what they found.

“obituary for jacob crisp” and “jacob crisp”

Yes you can find Jacob Crisp’s obituary on my blog here. I’m pretty sure that it was Jacob’s grandson who commented on my blog who was searching for the obituary. So score 1 for my blog!

“how we remember marshall taylor today”

I’m not sure what Marshall Taylor the searcher was looking for. I have several in my Taylor tree. None of my Taylor information has been added into the website database yet, but you can read some of my Taylor blog entries here.

“hammett family burial in lexington park mall parking lot”

I knew this would happen! Everyone wonders about it but there’s practically nothing online about it. My website is apparently now the #1 Google item when searching for this search term. You can read about the San Souci Shopping Cemetery here.

“elliott family of rowan county”

I don’t know about the Elliott Family but if you need to know about the Mays, Slusher, Click, Crisp, Adkins, Rowe, and a million others, you found the right place.

“grandma’s kitchen recipes blog”

When I started this blog, I had every intention of going through my Grandma’s recipe book and sharing some. Things happen though and it just didn’t come through. You can still read about her famous fudge recipe here though. There are some Grandma’s Recipe Blogs you can find though, The first few are: here, here, and here.

“brooklyn daily eagle online”

Words can not express how much I love the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online. It was vital in breaking down a mystery for me on my Brooklyn Moores. You can read my write up about the paper helping me here. Or you can just go straight to the source: here.

“tng templates”

This is the top search term for my website. You will land on my writeup of the TNG Software I use. I do not have any links to templates, but it comes with 8 now and they are very customizable! The website for the software is here.

I’m having indecision problems again. The problem is I’m never sure I’m doing things correctly. I’m sure the most important thing in my family file is that everyone is documented and well sourced. I’m sure that I’ve tried to do that. However, it gets very hard the more information you gather and learn. I say that because every blog or article I read all have different opinions! There doesn’t seem to be any 100% correct way to do it, which isn’t bad but what are beginnings and newbies supposed to do? I’m a perfectionist, so it’s inevitable that I’ll start second guessing myself and my methods. That’s why I’m writing here today.

If you are like me and you eventually start second guessing yourself, I have some advice. Take a break from what you’re worried about. Take a whole day off from the computer for example. Heck, I’d take a week if I didn’t think it’d trigger an apocalypse. I’m sorry for the over exaggeration, I’m addicted to my computer.

Tell yourself that it’s all going to be alright! The important thing is that you are comfortable with what you have. I’m not saying forget all rules and just merge to your hearts content, but really if you aren’t sharing your tree with the whole internet, if you are still in the process of learning and understand that… Just relax. You’ll figure it out and you can’t please everyone, so find a method that works for you.

Continue reading “The Indecision Monster is Back” →