Wisteria

I mentioned this clock in the  post  I did Tuesday. I had originally set out to write down a story about the clock but wandered a bit. In this post, I will try to stay on track so that this story does not get forgotten: That this clock was rescued from a house fire is somewhat obvious when you look at the back of it where it is blackened. My father had told me of the two-story home owned by his grandfather, John Willis Watts (who died long before he was born). My dad said the kitchen was built away from the house and that there may have been a fire in the kitchen. My father told me that this clock damaged by fire probably came from that house, although my father is no longer here to help me with any more details unfortunately. He remembered there being a lot of old stuff in that house and wondered what became of it all. My dad also remembered his dad’s Uncle George having a house near them. I had often listened and asked my grandfather (Cephas Bryant Watts,...

This clock was given to me by my father. He had someone appraise it for historical purposes and gave me a laminated index card with that information on it as well. Having misplaced this card several times over the years, I have decided to put it right in with the clock now so the item and information will always be together. Even genealogists lose their “census” and I am surprised by how much I do not remember about research I have done. A recent example: During the past eight years or so of friendship, I have been helping a friend and her family gather information on their family history. Recently, this friend showed me photos she had taken of an old family bible in her aunt’s possession. I swore I had never seen that bible before. When I looked at notes I had taken about eight years ago though, I saw that I already had copies of the family history pages of that same bible! I guess I just didn’t recognize the cover as well the content. I have cautioned this same friend to w...

I wrote the last post in memory of the twin infants of my grandfather’s cousins. I had mentioned that I began gathering information in anticipation of self-publishing a book on my Watts family. The story of the twins did not make it in that final publication. I found that I needed to condense some information in order to make it more manageable to get it published. I decided to include only birth and death information on most of the later generations. Although that story and others might be considered insignificant in the grand scheme of things, it’s the urge to preserve these stories that makes me a family historian in the first place. Here’s another story that I want to tell about children who might otherwise be forgotten. This story was told to me by my Uncle Perk Watts when I first started gathering information on the family back in 1989: “Aunt Ivy’s kids, Ollie and Eva died around age 1 of colitis and were buried on the farm [in the small town of Sinking Fork in Christian...

I developed a morbid fascination with post-mortem photographs of children a few days ago. It started out because of this  blog post by Lorinne McGinnis Shultz on the subject. Then I kept searching the web for more images. There are several boards on Pinterest dedicated to the subject, though I have found that errors and misinformation abound. For instance, some of these sites state that when one can see the stand behind the subject , it means that the subject was dead and being propped up by the stand. This is an error. The stand was actually used by photographers to keep their living subjects still for the long exposure time photographs took back then. That is not to say that some photographers did pose their deceased subjects as this vintage photograph  appears to illustrate. One cannot use just the appearance of a stand as evidence of a post-mortem photograph any more than one can use the appearance of hidden mothers holding their infant children (such as those found her...

WWI Draft Registration Card for Rollie Backus from FamilySearch.org I have completed several posts on my former mother-in-law's Backus line and wanted to provide a research summary of what I've found so far:  Rollie George Backus was born in New York in 15 August 1881. He was listed as a nephew in the household of Adelbert Hitchcock and his wife Clarissa in the town of Yorkshire, Cattaraugus Co, NY during the 1900 U.S. Census. I have found nothing definitive to determine Rollie's exact connection to the Hitchcock family yet, although I should post a summary of that work soon.  There was a Backus family living in the Kill Buck/Great Valley area of Cattaraugus Co. for which there appears to be no relation. The only other Backus in Cattaraugus County in 1900 was an Elsie Backus, born in February of 1881. She had been married for 4 years (to whom?) but was living as a servant in the household of Cyrus Rhoades in the town of Leon. A Lucy Lyons was also listed ...

I just love it when I find a kindred spirit out there in blog-land! I stumbled across the photo-history blog Hunting and Gathering by accident (or serendipity) the other day on 19th & early mid-20th century Georgia photographs and their associates. A photographer’s project has just started taking shape with me because of access to early photo cabinet cards I’ve had from the Cattaraugus County, New York area. The blog posts and work done on Hunting and Gathering inspired me to do more with this project of mine and I plan to post some of my work soon. This post  reminded me of the above photograph I have from a friend’s genealogy collection. My guess is that it is from the early 1900s as it appears to be a snapshot similar to ones I’ve seen from that time period and may have been taken with a Brownie camera. From what I understand from Maureen Taylor’s Uncovering Your Ancestry through Family Photographs, Kodak had sold a quarter million of these cameras by the year ...

In the novel People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks ,* the central character, Hanna Heath, is a rare-book expert and conservator. Hanna describes her work as not merely technical but having something to do with an “intuition about the past” wherein she links “research with imagination” and eventually adds a “few grains to the sandbox of human knowledge.” I resonate with those thoughts when it comes to doing family history research. I’ve been researching for some twenty-plus years. So now when I go on a hunt, I usually have a feel for what records I can find to uncover a little more about an individual and flesh out a more concrete identity. Sharing it with others is my way of adding a few grains to the sandbox of human knowledge about the past. Take for instance my recent foray into the ancestry of Harvey B. Potter.  I knew about Harvey because his great-granddaughter showed me a picture of him and said that he played the fiddle all over the area. His youngest daughter...

I wrote an article for the WMGS newsletter, Michigana , to share my blogging experience and reasons why one should create a blog (Vol. 58, No. 1, Jan/Feb/March 2012). I have tweaked it a bit to add as this post: First off, the word “blog” is a shortened term for “weblog.” According to Wikipedia , a blog is a personal journal published on the internet consisting of entries (typically called posts) that are usually displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. The word “blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Blogs can be specific to a subject, such as genealogy, which is what this is all about. Basically, there are three reasons why you should create a genealogy blog: the past, the present and the future. Past : You should create a blog because of the voices in your blood. Author GG Vandagriff wrote an aptly titled book, Voices in Your Blood: Discovering Your Identity Through Family History . In ...

(l to r) Agnes (VanderWerf) Katsma, Margaret Katsma DeWitt, Gertrude Katsma Houtstra, Theresa Katsma Timmer This blog post is for Sibling Saturday because this photo is of my grandmother and her sisters (and a sister-in-law). Another reason is because a deeper look at the photo itself also reveals information about my mother and her siblings. My grandmother, Theresa Katsma Timmer (the woman on the right), died in March of 2007. After conferring with our Aunt Marcia who took care of the estate, my sister brought Grandma’s photograph collection back to her house. On a visit shortly thereafter, I went through them. One of the first photographs in the pile was a large 8 x 10 sized photograph of an infant. My sister told me that when she asked, Aunt Marcia said she wasn’t sure who the infant was. I set it aside and kept digging. I was looking for older photographs and pulled a few that I wanted to scan. The photograph of my grandmother and her siblings caught my eye. I set it a...