Mary Menzies-Winters

I’ve been hard at work tracing down my Menzies ancestors. I thought I didn’t have much on this line of the family. Then I found a few things that helped me over a brick wall. So now I’m trying to go slowly and search out these families. For anyone keeping count, though I don’t know why ^.^, my new family-file is up to 270 people. This is all sourced information without me going bonkers on the “allied families”, so this is a big accomplishment for me. It’s so hard for me not to go crazy collecting relatives.

I thought I’d share one of my interesting finds with Mary Menzies-Winters. Mary is the sister of my 3rd Great Grandmother, Jennie T Menzies-Love. She was born around 1840 in Lancashire, England (most likely Liverpool). According to a listing I found on the Love-Menzies Family Outline, she married a man with the surname Winters. So that was my first step in locating her after she disappears from her family household. I found her in 1870 in New York City living with her husband Jacob Winters and their 6 children. By 1880, Jacob was gone and Mary had remarried a man named Theodore Thomas. When I went to the 1900 census, I’ll be honest, I did I quick search for a Mary Thomas, but nothing came up. So I just set out to find her children. My reasoning was, if her children were centrally located, most likely that’s where I’d find Mary.

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I Love Technology

Let me be up front. My usual operating procedure is I get really excited about something, spend all my time on that one thing, then I lose steam. I’m working on spreading myself out a little more in all aspects of my life. I really don’t multi-task well is what I’m getting down to. So we’ll see how my new outlook affects me in August.

Website Re-Design: This is still in the works. I haven’t given up on it or my previous design. I just want to tweak it a bit more. I’ve also decided to actually learn the coding I’m using instead of just trying to manipulate things from a ready-made template. I’ve been much happier with my TNG websites after I ditched the templates and made my own design. I’m hoping the same goes for WordPress. I really want a better integrated website. I’m good with HTML and CSS, so I just have to learn what I need to about some WordPress coding to make my designs work.

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Surname Saturday: Love

LOVE

The LOVE family name originates in Scotland. They are a sept of the Clan MacKinnon. A sept is an English word for a division of a family, especially a division of a clan. [1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sept] There is a section of my Clans and Families of Scotland book dedicated to Clan MacKinnon. I will just hit a few points for you:

1. Clan Motto: Audentes fortuna juvat (Gaelic: Fortune favours the bold)
2. Clan Slogan: Cuimhnich bás Ailpein (Gaelic: Remember the death of Alpin)
3. The MacKinnons are a branch of Clan Alpin and claim descent from the great-grandson of Alpin, King of Scots.
4. The Clan fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

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Menzies Leaps and Bounds

I’ve made some great advances in researching the Menzies line of my family! I’m very excited about what I’ve found. This adventure started when I decided to sign up for a 7 day free trial of World Vital Records. I thought maybe this would be a cheaper way of being able to access the UK records I’ve been holding off on. Well, after a few hours of trying to get some of the image viewers to work, I just went ahead and upgraded my Ancestry.com membership. Even if I only have the World Membership for one year it’ll be worth it to me! I’m still going to check out World Vital Records for the rest of my trial, but I’m just more comfortable with the Ancestry format. I’ll probably do an entry on navigating World Vital Records at the beginning of next week to test it out some more.

Once I upgraded my Ancestry, It was like being let loose! I went right to work. If you’ve been reading for awhile you’ve seen a small amount of progress being made on the Menzies front. You can read that progress by clicking the Menzies tag in the sidebar, or you can just take a quick peek at the more informative entry: Menzies Mysteries. That entry will show you that I’ve found where the Menzies immigrated to America in 1854. They briefly stayed with son (presumably), Alexander, who had already immigrated and set himself up as a ‘Druggist.’

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Overall Goals and Purpose

My Purpose

  1. My main purpose in doing genealogy is just to learn more about where I come from. It sounds like every other reason in the world, but before I started doing genealogy I knew next to nothing about my family. We live so far from the rest of the family, that I’ve never had constant contact with anyone but my parents and siblings. All other family, I only see once a year if I’m lucky. So doing genealogy has helped me discover why I am the way I am. Why I love Ireland so much, my love of forms and bookkeeping, things people probably don’t question in their lives.

My Primary Goal

  1. I think my primary goal is just to ‘collect’ relatives. I don’t have a particular need or want to do this professionally. I don’t have any grand ideas of being related to royalty. I just kind of like collecting relatives. In fact, when I first started, I collected all kinds of people. I would research just to research. When I cleaned out my file a few years ago, I removed over 100 people that had no blood relationship to me but were distant relatives of people who married into my family.
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Saturday Night Fun: I Write Like

No Surname Saturday post this week! Sorry, I was just so busy I didn’t have the concentration to write it up. It’ll definitely go up next week! Instead I’m participating in Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, a weekly series from Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings.

1) Find something that you have written that you are really proud of – the best of your work. Do an Edit > Copy of it.

2) Go to the website http://iwl.me/ and Paste your text into the waiting box.

3) Tell us which famous author you write like. Write it up in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog, or post it on Facebook. Insert the “badge of honor” in your blog if you can.

So here’s mine, I used my Found You Alfred! post about finally partially breaking down my brick wall with Alfred Love.

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

That’s interesting, I’ve never read anything by H.P. Lovecraft, but Wikipedia says he wrote “weird fiction”. ^.^ I’ll take that as a compliment I guess! I do find it funny that a post dealing with the Love family turned up an author named Lovercraft. Especially since I believe nothing is a coincidence!

Milestones are Nice

I’m celebrating today. Not only is my new site design almost finished, but I’m just about a quarter of the way through re-working my family file. I hit 200 people today and I’m finishing up the Love/Menzies line today. I’m excited to get the Surname Saturday: Love post written up, so I’ll start that as soon as I finish today. After I finish that, I’ll be done with my Grandpa Moore’s side of the family and it’ll be onto the Redford side of the family. That side isn’t very big yet, so really I’m almost half done. It won’t take me long to rework that section. Then it’s no turning back until I verify Grandma Taylor’s family tree once and for all!

Found You Alfred!

I love the Love family. When I first found that the Loves were such a big part of my tree, I always thought it would be easy to research these guys! Boy was I wrong. In my naive beginnings, I couldn’t think of a better name to research than Love. How unique a name that is! Then reality set in. Reality in the form of Lone. Lore. Long. Lane. Lare. Lave. Luff. You get the picture. There are a million different ways you can incorrectly transcribe Love. I don’t blame the transcribers though, because they’re trying to make sense of something a hundred years old. How are they to know the name is actually Love?

Love-Menzies Family Outline
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Tombstone Tuesday: Love

If I can get enough time this week, I will be doing a Surname Saturday post on the Loves this weekend. This would be the tombstone of William Wallace Love and his son Percy Everett Love. Thanks to Great-Grandma Llewellyn’s Diner Tree, William is no longer my first known Love. I’ve got droves of them now. I’m working on adding more of them to the website today, then tonight, more design work on the new and improved design!

Tombstone Tuesday is a daily blogging theme of GeneaBloggers.