Bill West at West in New England
Dr. Bill Smith at Dr. Bill Tells Ancestor Stories
Amanda Acquard at A Tale of Two Ancestors
Jenna Mills at Desperately Seeking Surnames
Heather Rojo at Nutfield Genealogy
Travis LeMaster at TJLGenes: Preserving Our Family History
When Randy Seaver mentioned John Newmark's blog at Transylvanian Dutch on January 15th, I decided to read a few of his blogs before deciding to follow him. In one post, he had a newspaper article from St. Louis dated 1917. That is the same city and year that my great-grandfather, Yates Adams was either murdered or committed suicide of which I wrote about in the Monday Madness- A Suicide or a Murder blog. Right after I posted my blog, Apple of Apple's Tree wrote a comment, "I would look to see if there are any St Louis papers you can access online. An account written where the death occurred may have more information." Well, it took 11 years for me to try and solve this, so I got the nerve to write John Newmark personally and inquired if he had any suggestions for me. (Ha, did he ever.) I told him about my ancestor's death in 1917 in St. Louis, exactly the same location and year that his blog pertained to. After hitting send, I went and got a drink, came back and there was a pdf of a newspaper article about my great-grandfather's death. 11 years vs. 17 minutes, what can I say? But...that information contained some differing information from my original newspaper article. Now I am trying to find yet a third newspaper article from Battle Creek, Michigan. Thanks Apple for your comment and John for the newspaper article.
Heather Rojo of Nutfield Genealogy and I are distant cousins through the Balch line. Also, Midge Frazel at Granite in my Blood and I seem to share quite a few surnames from Connecticut.
Bill West of West in New England and Gini Webb of Ginisology spent quite a bit of time helping me with two different problems. Bill tried to find the book, The Culture Club, about the Boston Athenaeum. We couldn't find it around here, so Bill, I finally ordered it from Amazon. Gini helped me for a long time assisting me in trying to post my blog to fb. I still haven't been able to do it. But on Jan. 29th, David Allen Lambert of NEHGS posted one for me, and I was pretty happy and very surprised. That was the day before the big story about the relationship between President Obama and Scott Brown (new MA senator) appeared in the news, of which David was one of the two researchers.
I was in a genealogy mode this past week. Went to the New England Historic Genealogical Society Library (NEHGS) this week and had a nice long talk with David Dearborn, librarian and then I called Eric Grundset, librarian at the DAR in Washington. Neither blogs or are on face book. And, both men were at the same ALA meeting this month as our own Amanda Acquard, of A Tale of Two Ancestors!
Thanks go to Apple for mentioning my blog articles about Cemetery Research in her Weekly Rewind post. It was nice being listed with Steve Danko's blog, as he is a pal of four years.
Now the sad news. Another suggestion from Apple at Apple's Tree pertained to a November blog in which I mentioned I had donated a very large DAR membership certificate belonging to my ancestor, dated 1901. She suggested I contact the DAR. At long last, I made the call and spoke with the archivist, and we corresponded 10 times! One of the last things she wrote was, "The other certificate from you that I came across in the accession records was number 90-275, a certificate given to those who attended the NSDAR Centennial dinner." At least I now know...it is missing!