End of Summer

Posted on by Kathleen

Here we are, at the end of another summer. My summer has been busy, busy, busy. As all summers are I guess. I’ve traveled to see family quite a bit, had family visit me. All in all, it was a very fun summer. I spent some time in Florida with my brother and his family and went to the annual family reunion in Upstate New York. I’m home for a long stretch now and ready to get back to work on my projects. Here is what I’m working on currently.

Family History Book

For the last 6 months or so, I’ve been working on writing up the family history on my Dad’s side of the family. My Great Aunt Barbara and her family are always interested in what I’m finding and I never really put it all together on that line before. So I did! It was really fun for me, so I am now trying to do it for each line. It’s a bit of a long process, and I’m not sure what I’m doing with it after I’m done, but I figured I can work that out later. Everyone who has read the work in progress has loved it and also given me some really good suggestions and inspiration. So I’m excited to get back to this project.

Organization

When isn’t a genealogist working on their organization? I’m still sorting through computer files and trying to make sure I don’t have 7 copies of the same image. Sometimes it feels like I do. My computer files just keep exploding into a file dump. I’m hoping just chopping away little by little is going to finally work for me. So far so good. It’s still a mess but a large percentage of my photo scans are now organized by person or family group.

Identifying Pictures

I will have some posts up soon about how I’ve been able to verify some of my previously un-identified pictures. This project has been one of the most fun ones and pretty rewarding. I really didn’t think I would ever identify some of these pictures and now I’m starting to think it will just take a little more determination. By the way, only one person in the picture above remains unidentified! Just one!

Website Organization and Overhaul

I’m still working behind the scenes to learn how to seamlessly integrate all the various sections of the website. It’s a little difficult for me to focus on coding and design these days, but I’m really inspired after talking with cousins and friends about the possibilities. One of the things I want to do is have a Diary of Llewellyn section. Where the entries are easy to navigate and there is biography pages for people mentioned and pictures integrated to help tell the story. I also still have to work on the database section of the website. My list is certainly getting longer.

I hope everyone’s had a great summer and I hope to update here at least once a month on my progress. If I’m making any cool genealogy discoveries those will be posted as well. It’s just a see how it goes situation around here right now.

End of the School Year

Posted on by Kathleen

All across social media is the buzz of the end of another school year. Graduates are celebrating the end of their high school years. The mothers celebrating their babies first year of school. It’s so fun to celebrate all these milestones. I thought I would take today to share some old school pictures I found in Llewellyn’s collections. These photos are also going into my Llewellyn Network on Ancestry. Which I’ve started building centered around the Diary of Llewellyn.

Some of them are labeled with year and teacher name. The last one even has an extensive list of names!

George William Thorward Class Picture

This one was not labeled but there is some math equations on the back. 😂

Llewellyn Thorward, Kindergarten picture

“Kindding Garden” Miss Burnett is the actual caption on the back of this picture.

Llewellyn Thorward, 3rd Grade – Miss Lun? Teacher

The name on the back of this one is a bit difficult to read. I plan to do more research on Caldwell teachers and clarify this name.

George W. Thorward, unknown grade

No captions on this one but I do recognize George immediately.

Llewellyn Thorward, 8th Grade

This is the picture that has the whole list of names on the back. I am hoping to use Ancestry Networks and the facial searches to maybe identify more. Llewellyn’s good friend Helen Tice and Helen Steinhoff, sister of Willa Steinhoff, are also in the picture. Willa features heavily in the Diary of Llewellyn but is a few years younger then Llewellyn. Actually, what I’ve come to find since using Networks is that most of those mentioned in the diary are a few years younger than her. I knew before they were all members of the Epworth League. Which is a youth group in the Methodist Church for ages 18 to 35. At first I thought it strange that so many were younger then her but now I see it was the Church group that made them that much closer.

I’ve been having quite a bit of fun with the Networks because of all the pictures I have with no labels. Ancestry has some Caldwell yearbooks online, so it’s also been a big help. Unfortunately it’s not for the years Llewellyn attended, but I have some surprises even if they aren’t direct relatives! That’s for another entry though. 😂

The Moores and the Great Chicago Fire

Posted on by Kathleen
The Currier & Ives lithograph shows people fleeing across the Randolph Street Bridge. Thousands of people literally ran for their lives before the flames, unleashing remarkable scenes of terror and dislocation. "The whole earth, or all we saw of it, was a lurid yellowish red," wrote one survivor. "Everywhere dust, smoke, flames, heat, thunder of falling walls, crackle of fire, hissing of water, panting of engines, shouts, braying of trumpets, roar of wind, confusion, and uproar."

Above is a reproduction of a Currier & Ives lithograph showing people fleeing the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. I’ve always wondered if my Moore family were present in Chicago at the time of the fire but I’ve never pinned down their actual location or where they were in relation to the fire. Recently, I tasked myself with finding that information.

Continue reading “The Moores and the Great Chicago Fire” →

Identifying Pictures: Speed Round

Posted on by Kathleen

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

Spent My Weekend With The Johnsons

Posted on by Kathleen

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. 😂

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.
Continue reading “Mystery Monday: Grandpa on a Bench” →

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.

Continue reading “Identifying More Locations: Cypress Gardens” →