I never thought I’d have anything to contribute to Madness Monday at GeneaBloggers. Sure I have plenty of dementia in the family but I doubted I’d ever have any good stories about this subject. A while back (meaning I can’t remember when), I got the death certificate for my Great-Great Grandfather. I got quite a surprise when looking at his cause of death.
The first Google Earth Adventure was so much fun, I’m back to do it again! This time it will be taking you on one of my first Genealogy trips. It took place around 2003 or 2004? I’m not exactly sure. It was this trip when I got the majority of my Tombstone pictures. We were in Ohio for a reunion and I convinced Grandma to take us to Kentucky to visit the cemetery. Actually, it might have been her idea. Like I said, who can remember. This was when I was just getting into putting all my gathered information together. It was right before Grandma insisted on putting herself in the nursing home and the dementia set in. I even recorded her telling me a story from her childhood. I might have to attach that to the end of this post!
I am having an issue. As I jump into Genealogy blogging with both feet, I also need to remember my responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is to correctly show and identify where my information comes from. So far, I haven’t posted anything that I would consider super factual or important. I take a very tongue in cheek, fluffy pajamas method of life. Trust me when I say that I do actually cite all my sources, and anything in my tree that isn’t cited, is not actual information to me. I do joke about things I haven’t “proven” yet, but I don’t actual dwell on those things.
I was reading some blogs today and it struck me that I might not actually come across as a serious person. I do take my family history very seriously, fluffy pajamas aside of course. My problem is that when I began to really delve into my research, I was 18 years old. So even though I have my sources cited, they aren’t cited correctly. So that’s what I’m doing now. I’m going through one person at a time, and I’m fixing my family tree. I do have the whole tree up on moore-mays.org and I’m fixing it as I go. If I were putting my tree up for the first time, I’d only put verified information in. The problem is when I was 18, I published it out there in the Ancestry.com world. It was a horrible thing to do but it is what it is. The reason I haven’t taken it down is that many people have emailed me over the years about that tree. Even if I were to delete it, it’s still in Ancestry.com’s database. I can’t get it deleted for the life of me. It was almost 8 years ago that I uploaded it there and they’ve changed formats so much that it’s a complicated process to remove it. This is the main reason I’m so hesitant to put another tree on Ancestry.com. I don’t like that people can just merge the trees and then that’s it. Your information is on someone else’s tree and they take it as 100% proven fact.
Mary Elizabeth Taylor
Lula Margaret Applegate-Taylor
Wordless Wednesday is a Daily Blogging Topic that I got from GeneaBloggers. To participate in Wordless Wednesday simply create a post with the main focus being a photograph or image. Some people also include attribute information as to the source of the image (date, location, owner, etc.). Some have begun doing a “Not So Wordless Wednesday” with the main focus still being an image but there is a backstory to the image.
Okay, so I told you before that when I was in eighth grade, my grandmother gave me a copy of her family tree. Well a few years after that, she also sent me a whole mess of recipes. They were in a big box and also in that box was a cookie press. I wish I still had that cookie press, but we probably lost it in the Great House Migration. Remind me to chronicle that sometime! This month the weather has been particularly nice on the weekends. I guess getting 2+ feet of snow dropped on you really clears the air so to speak. We’ve taken advantage of this weather and we’re rehabbing one of our old sheds. We’ve lived in this house for at least 20 years now (since I was 5 or so!), so we’ve collected some clutter.
