The view this morning from my computer desk in The Dungeon. The rest of the house looks more or less the same, probably a little worse.
That’s all we have left at our current home. Just a week and a day. Then we move to Texas.
The whole house is discombobulated now, with packed boxes, half-packed boxes, packing materials, sorted and unsorted stuff strewn everywhere. If you’ve moved anytime recently, you get it. We haven’t moved since 2002. If you’ve downsized, you get it. We up-sized in 2002 and remained in accumulation mode, rather than decumulation.
Ah, well, decumulation began in 2020, when I decided I’d had my dad’s old tools for 22 years, had done nothing with them, and that other people needed them more than I did. I found lots of buyers on Facebook Marketplace. Before long, my garage looked better. With a little help from our son on one of his trips here, we even got to the point where we could get one car in.
Then I tackled the books, and between selling and donating them, we got rid of a couple of thousand. Before long, I moved on to paper items, digitizing my genealogy files and recycling the paper. Then on to writing files, making sure I had digital copies and back-ups, and again recycling the paper. All told, I was able to get rid of about 200 3-ring binders. The last 50 will go in our estate sale, each with a few tab dividers and sheet protectors in it.
I’m not sure whether I’ll get to post again from this side of the Red River, though I’ll try. If not, I’ll be back at it at some point. Y’all be good in the meantime.
The box of Wayne’s letters written during World War 2.
My sleeping rhythms have been off lately. If I wake up at or near 3 a.m., I can’t get back to sleep. I’m restless lying in bed. After a half hour of lying there awake, I generally get up and try to sleep sitting in my easy chair. That will work maybe one day out of three. Sometimes I read for an hour then am tired enough to sleep for an hour. Other times I just recline, maybe dozing a little but mostly trying to still my racing mind.
Monday-Tuesday night and Tuesday-Wednesday night was different. Oh, the waking up at an importune time for getting back to sleep happened. But after an hour or so passed, putting me in the 4 o’clock a.m. hour, I decided why the heck am I trying. I got up, got dressed, took my computer to The Dungeon and decided to begin my day. I worked on the letters, and in those two days was able to finish the transcribing work. I also was able to go back and correct one letter I realized I hadn’t completed.
The rest of the work consists of putting the letters into one document file, formatting it, sorting through photos of that era and adding them to the file, then computing publishing tasks. Proofreading will be included at some point.
Unfortunately, all that will have to wait until our move from Arkansas to Texas, plus finding the energy to set up the new house. When I get the book done—perhaps I should say IF I ever get it done—we’ll have to see.
We move from NW Arkansas to Lake Jackson, TX either Jan 31 or Feb 7. Or maybe a day either side of that.
Where there once was a little organization there is now chaos. Where there was once order that is now…something, I suppose disorder is a good enough word.
But where there used to be areas jammed with stuff, there is now much less stuff. It may all be in disarray, but a lot of stuff is gone. Some was taken on to Lake Jackson before Christmas. So has been tossed out. Paper and cardboard has been recycled. One refrigerator was emptied and moved, the other is much reduced in contents at we consume what was in it. I wonder why we ever bought a 3-lb bag of frozen blueberries. They will be fully consumed by tomorrow. I took a package of what I can only call mystery meat out of the freezer last night. We’ll see shortly if its thawed enough to know what it is, and if we’ll be having it for supper tonight. The pantry is bordering on empty now, although there’s enough canned goods left to give us some interesting meals the rest of the way.
I’m not sure whether I’ll find the time to post again this side of the move, but maybe next Monday.
Editing completed 1/5; hope to publish not later than 1/15.
Having posted a year in review for life in general, and a year in review for my writing activities, it’s now time to post writing plans for the new year. But should I call them plans? I’m in the midst of a move from Arkansas to Texas, a major life change and disruption. Can I even make plans, giving all that’s going on? I’m not going to get a lot done for the next month, and even a couple of months after that, I’ll be busy setting up the new house, finding doctors, learning how to do without CATV, etc.
But I have to have a plan. Perhaps I call it dreams, aiming very high, but probably having to settle for something less. First, I’ll type out my projects in progress, then move on to dreams.
Finish editing Vol. 7 of A Walk Through Holy Week and publish it. As of today (I’m wring this Friday evening for posting on Monday), I have two chapters to edit. Then a week of formatting and doing publishing activities. Hopefully I’ll have this published by Jan 15. Update Monday 5 Jan: I just finished the last edit. Next will be publishing tasks.
Do the final editing and publishing tasks for Vol. 8 of A Walk Through Holy Week. That will finish the project. All eight volumes will be published, and I can look toward promoting the series.
Finish transcribing my father-in-law’s, Wayne’s, World War 2 letters. I’m able to do two of them a day before fatigue sets in. As of Friday, I have thirty letters to go. That means I should finish the transcribing in mid-January. Then I’ll be putting a book together, combining the letters into one file, synchronizing his war journal with them, and publishing it as a book. I don’t know for sure how long this will take. The war journal is typed but not yet digitized. So I’m not going to put a timeline on this. Plus, this is just a project for family and the hometown museum, not with commercial intentions. So there’s no real deadline. If I find the time, I’ll try to combine the letter files into book format before the end of the month, and be ready to work in the journal once my office is set up in Texas.
The clean-up and organizing prior to moving has resulted finding more letters from our years as expatriates in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. So I need to republish those books. Plus my family asked me to add more photos to the Kuwait book. So I’ll do that in odd moments during the year. My loose deadline is the end of the year for these two projects.
At some point in the year, I want to get back to writing on The Forest Throne series. Two volumes are published, and two more are planned. These are short, middle-grade books that will be somewhat quick to write. However, I don’t think I’ll put any deadline on this.
One other project that is somewhat pie-in-the-sky, is the story of my maternal ancestry. I’ve made some amazing discoveries as I’ve researched my ancestry. Many people have told me I need to write it down to preserve it. So I finally made a start at it. Tentatively titled Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lies, I’ve written 2580 words in it. Once again, this will be a book for family, not for commercial sales. It’s also a type of book to be written when the spirit moves, rather sitting down and working on it day by day.
There are other things on my writing projects list that I could mention here, but I seriously doubt I can complete everything included in this post. I’ll have to come back in a couple of months, see where I am, and modify the list accordingly.
The probate file confirmed what we had pretty much concluded beforehand, that George Victor Hepburn was NOT my great-great-grandfather. More likely he was my great-grandmother’s brother—though that is not yet confirmed.
Part of the reason for our recent trip to St. Lucia was to see what we could learn about my St. Lucia roots. We have a lot of what I call “family lore”, but not much of that is backed up by documentation. My maternal grandmother talked about St. Lucia all the time, and how they were high society there, having servants.
She came to the USA in May 1918, and my mother was born in September that year. I found documentation for those two events, a combination of recordings on calendars made by my grandmother’s uncle David Sexton. And we knew my grandmother’s mother, Henrietta (Hepburn) Sexton Harris. She lived well into her 90s, and I knew her and spent many a holiday when she visited in Rhode Island.
Although, it wasn’t until I made contact with cousins in New York City, the children and grandchildren of my grandmother’s half-sisters that the full story came out. But it came out as family lore. Henrietta was one of six siblings, but the cousins couldn’t agree on who those children were, nor on the name of her father. They agreed on three of the six, but not the other three. So, as the years progressed, I knew a trip to St. Lucia was necessary. But would it be productive?
My grandmother, Alfy Sexton, a year or so after emigrating to the US.
The answer is yes. The first morning our son and I drove to the St. Lucia archives. It’s not a big building from the outside, and they were in the process of moving from one building to another. But the women working there were friendly and helpful. I paid the research fee, then Charles did most of the talking. He had the names we were interested in, the type of documents we hoped to get copies of, and the years of interest. Meanwhile, the archivists were anxious to see the photos I had, and to scan them. One lady worked on scanning while another did a preliminary check of their indexes to see if maybe some of the documents we were interested in were in the archives. After the public hours closed, they would do a more complete check.
This was actually more than we’d hoped for. I had heard that the St. Lucia archives had few documents, and those disorganized—that many documents were destroyed in major fires in Castries in 1927 and 1948. Maybe some records were lost, but it seemed they had many extant, and an organized system for retrieving them.
We went back the next day to see what they actually found (in many places, sometimes an archive index can be erroneous). This gave us a chance to pick and choose what we wanted to have copies of. While we were doing this, I noticed the receptionist had one huge book open and was transcribing records. I didn’t come up to look over her shoulder to see what the records were. Suffice to say that additional deeds or marriages or birth records or powers of attorney or probate matters were added to the digital archives that day.
Those were the only two days we went to the archives. We paid fees (cash only, though they take US dollars) to receive digital copies of the documents, and they came a week later as email attachments. Family lore was confirmed in some cases, but confusion added by other documents. Oh well, we have time to sort it all out, come up with ancestral link conclusions and working theories of paths for future research.
I’ve researched in a few courthouses in the US, but this was the first time for me to go to a foreign archive in the hope of receiving relevant documents and data. A good experience, though I suspect this was a one-time only experience.
Years ago, I hoped to someday travel to St. Lucia, the land of my mother’s ancestors. Well, that was their land for a generation or two. They came to St. Lucia from St. Vincent, their neighboring island in the Caribbean.
But life got in the way. There was work and marriage and raising children then overseas posts many miles and time zones away from the Windward Islands. Our travels during our expatriate years took us in other directions.
An unusual view for a Thanksgiving dinner.
Then there was more work, days of accumulation in anticipation of retirement. That retirement finally came. We had money and time to go, but no real gumption. It seemed that all the years of activity had consumed a lifetime of initiative, and so here we sat, in Northwest Arkansas, waiting for energy to overcome declining health and move us from our easy chairs to seats on a plane.
Finally, in June of this year, our son said, “Let’s go to St. Lucia,” giving us the needed push. Two other family members wanted to join us on the trip, but in the end were unable to. In trying to accommodate the most people, we settled on Thanksgiving week just past. We had timeshare points to burn.
The view of Castries harbor on our last evening.
So, on Nov 24 we flew from NW Arkansas to Charlotte, NC, spent a night (as planned) there due to the difficult connection, and flew on to St. Lucia. We had seven wonderful nights there, flying back on Dec 1, able to do it all in one day due to an easier connection.
The trip was a mix of genealogy research, meeting people I’d met online in my preparation for the trip, meeting a relative there (2nd cousin once removed), seeing the house my family owned and lived in, and experiencing my family’s culture, though obviously far removed in time from when my grandmother emigrated to the USA in 1918.
One post will not be sufficient to tell of this trip. It was sort of magical. In terms of genealogical research, we accomplished more than I expected. We should soon receive information that will allow us to get back one more generation with confirmed documentation. I found my great-grandfather’s grave in a cemetery with no grid pattern, and where most of the stones were broken or badly weathered to the point of being unreadable. The family house was awesome to see, and we learned much more about its history.
Alas, it wasn’t all fun and research, as a future post will tell.
Expect additional posts over the next few weeks, as time allows. I’m still waiting on photos from others, and am very busy buying one house, prepping this one for sale, and moving hopefully before two more months pass.
Meanwhile, many people have told me I have to write down everything I’ve learned about this side of the family. I actually started on that last Tuesday evening. The tentative title is Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lie. As they say, stay tuned.
One side of the blue sheet is letters already transcribed, the other side is yet to be done. I still have a long way to go.
Having completed (more or less) my project of reviewing, organizing, and deleting redundant scan files (originally numbering around 3,400, currently less than 100), and having completed transcribing my great-grand uncle’s diary of his 1921 trip to St. Lucia (in preparation for my trip there in the next few months), I have now only one remaining active special project: transcribing my late father-in-law’s World War 2 letters.
I have made progress on this; yet I’m not close enough to the end to know when that will come. At the end of my transcribing on Saturday, I had finished exactly 100 letters. Each has been pulled from the green plastic bin it sat in for at least 30 years, been dusted off, unfolded, deciphered, and the words and other key information added to an electronic file created especially for it, one file for each letter. Then it was put back in the bin in correct chronological order based on date of writing, not on the postmark. At the same time, I entered the letter into an index file formatted for eventual inclusion in a book of these letters.
I have only a few wartime photos of Wayne, this one of him on the left and his brother Ray on the right,
They trace the life of Wayne Cheney from his graduation from high school in 1942 through his leaving home for work/school, his enlistment as an 18-year-old, until his discharge from the army air corps in late 1945. So far, most of the letters are those written by Wayne to his family (dad, mother, two sisters) back in little Fowler, Kansas. Many of the envelopes include a “censor’s stamp” when he was located at a forward base overseas. A few have words excised with a razor blade as the censor removed something he thought inappropriate. A few of the letters are from his mother, a few from his older brother who was also in the army, and a few from his sisters.
That’s based on the 100 letters transcribed so far. I haven’t counted the ones not yet transcribed. Such counting seemed like a waste of time. But based on the thickness of the letters not yet done compared to those done, I estimate I have 120 to 150 more to go. I find I can only do so much of this work in a given day before I hit a wall of fatigue and have to shift to something else. Three letters a day is about my limit. At that rate, it will take me the rest of the year to complete the transcribing, accounting for trips and holidays.
Once that’s done, my plan is to take Wayne’s war diary/journal and integrate it with the letters. Before his death, Wayne typed his WW2 journal, adding a post-war supplement to it, and printed it in multiple copies. I gave one copy to his son, kept one, and trashed a number of duplicates. The electronic version is somewhere on a diskette in an old Word Perfect file. I think I will scan the printed file to text and work with that.
I don’t have a lot of photos from Wayne’s service year, but what few I have I’ll add in.
I have no idea how long this book will be. If the letters average 500 words and there are, say, 240 of them, that’s a 120,000 word book not including the diary/journal. That would be a sizable undertaking, and is possibly biting off quite a bit more than I can chew.
But there’s nothing to do but continue, and make this unfiltered history a little more accessible for the few who will be interested. If I’m able to complete the project, I’ll give a copy of the book to the Meade County Historical Museum, the Fowler Library, and give a copy to each near relative, I suppose. I’ll make it available on Amazon should there be a cousin or two interested.
It was about June 1998. I obtained some data about my maternal family from old address books of my grandmother that I took from my dad’s house after his death. We knew almost nothing about her family except her mother’s name (Rita Harris, the last name from a later marriage) and that she was from St. Lucia; the names of two half-sisters, Hiris and Hazel (but not, at that time, of the third, Muriel). My grandmother had told us her half-sisters were spinsters who had no children. But in the address books I found their names with different last names. Both Hiris and Hazel were in NY, but Hazel’s address was changed from NY to Alburquerque.
Making a long story a little shorter, another name with a New Mexico address was Evelyn Menzies. I sent to the Albuquerque newspaper for an obituary for Hazel (who I learned had died there in 1993), which listed Evelyn Menzies as her daughter. If Hazel was my grandmother’s half-sister, Evelyn would be my mom’s half-first-cousin and her children my half-second-cousins.
I decided to write Evelyn out of the blue, saying you probably don’t know who I am, but my research suggests you’re my mom’s cousin. Here’s how that letter started:
My name is David Todd. I am the grandson of Alfy M. (Sexton) Dorion, who was a half-sister of Hazel (Harris) Wildman. My research indicates that you are Hazel’s daughter. I got your address from the Albuquerque phone book, and your name from Hazel’s obituary. My purpose in writing to you is to introduce myself and to hopefully share family history and information.
While growing up, I knew that my grandmother had two half-sisters, Hiris and Hazel, but we never had any contact with them, never knew their last names, if they had families, etc. While going through dad’s papers over the last eight months (he died last August), I found address books which included Hiris’ name and address in New York City, and Hazel’s name and addresses in NYC and then Albuquerque. I next checked the Social Security Death Index, which listed both Hiris and Hazel and gave death dates and locations. Finding Hazel as having died in Albuquerque in 1993, I sent off to the newspaper for a copy of her obituary. It arrived yesterday.
I gave her information about the family and an anecdote about my great-grandmother so that she would know that I really knew her. Before long Evelyn called me. She said she knew who I was, that she had always known about her cousin Dorothy and her three children, even had pictures of us. I asked her why we never knew about them, and why my grandmother never had photos or them. Evelyn said, “It’s because we’re black.”
She went on to say that my great-grandmother was approximately 1/2 black, meaning I was part black. That was a bombshell, listening to Evelyn on the phone that Sunday in August, 1998 and hearing her strong Brooklyn accent. I had no idea.
That family wedding in 2000. Four of my half-second cousins in this photo.
Evelyn invited us to come to NM and meet them. We did that in November 1998. Evelyn put together some meetings with other family in the area. I met all her children and their children. It was a great time. A couple of years later Evelyn had us back for their son’s wedding, and then came to our daughter’s wedding.
Our contacts in person were few after that, but we kept in touch by phone. I found it incredible that she accepted us so readily into her family. Through the meetings, Evelyn told me much about our mutual family and what she knew about the St. Lucia years. Because of her, a new world and culture opened to me.
Evelyn died on August 14 [see her obituary here] after a long life, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gathered around her. She is already missed by them all, me included.
The typing is tedious, especially reading 83-year-old pencil scratching…
It’s hot out. Not as hot here at the north end of the southern states as it is in the Northeast, but our heat is definitely up. But of course, that’s to be expected for late June, almost July.
So I’ve changed my schedule. After rising, weighing, and checking my blood sugar, instead of going down to The Dungeon to begin various projects or work on my books, I go out and walk in the cool of the morning. I walked Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday this week, going 1.07, 1.28, 1.37 miles respectively. Thursday and Friday were slightly longer distances. And, as evidence of my healing from the many maladies of the last sixteen months, I’ve been able to walk without taking a walking stick to serve as a cane.
…but I’ll get through it, one letter a day for now….
Now, I wasn’t regularly walking before Monday. My excuse? First, the rain. Then the heat. Then tiredness. By the time I come upstairs from The Dungeon and eat breakfast, it’s already a little too hot to walk comfortably. Then evening, when you can walk in the twilight shadows, I’m either busy with TV watching or just too tired after the labors of the day. In fact, it had been well over a week, maybe closer to two, since I’d walked for exercise.
I made the decision last Saturday that I would shift to a summer work schedule on Monday, and so far, I’ve been faithful to it. My target is to be out the front door by 6:00 A.M. The first three days I was right on the money. That’s a little earlier than my normal rising time, so a longer midday nap time is part of the new schedule.
…but I have to admit I’m glad it’s not a bigger bin.
I see very little activity at that hour. A car or two with people heading to work. One time a jogger. One time a neighbor on his front deck drinking coffee and reading something. I’m back home in around 30 minutes. At that point I head to The Dungeon for my normal routine: devotional reading, prayer, check e-mail and Facebook and book sales (actually non-sales. Then, rather than editing, I do my two special projects.
One of those is digitizing my father-in-law’s letters, limiting myself to one a day, either scanning or transcribing as the case may be. At one letter a day, that project will take a couple of years. The other special project is cleaning up old scan files. All the genealogy research papers and letters I scanned had been saved to a proper filing system still resided on my computer and cloud drive as scan files. Perhaps them being in two (really three) places doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s not “clean”. So I’m going through those scan files, verifying that I saved them to the right folder and gave them the right name, then deleting them from the scan folder.
My goal is to clear away 50 scan files a day, six days a week, so 300 a week. I started with 3400 scan files to deal with. As of Thursday morning, I have 1,700 left. Thus, I have around six weeks more on this project. I’ll check back in with you around the end of July or sometime in August to give a report on this as to how the project is going.
After that, I do my morning stock work, eat breakfast, and maybe work outside awhile in the blackberry patch. I come back inside and go to The Dungeon to cool down and do a little editing. Midday is still reading in the sunroom, though that is now getting so hot I’ll need to move outside to a shaded area on our woodlot.
So what’s the new project, and how am I going to fit it in a busy schedule? Well, the new project is transcribing the wartime correspondence of my father-in-law, Wayne Cheney. These have been sitting in a plastic bin in our house for close to 30 years, waiting on someone to get them out and read them, do something with them. I decided that time had come, and that these letters from 1942-1945 were of greater importance than the newer letters I had been digitizing. Thus, I have suspended working on the newer letters in favor or the older ones.
I’ll work on them at the rate of one letter a day until I finish the scanned files project, then will accelerate the letters until I finish. I have no idea how many of these letters there are. Having now put together four letter collections, I have a system established and have learned to do this fairly efficiently. But I really have no idea how long this will take me because I don’t know the letter count. By the beginning of August, I hope to have 50 or so letters transcribed. At that point maybe I’ll count the rest and figure how long the whole project will take me, and make a report.
Sounds like I’ll be busy a while. Busy is good: stimulating to the brain and enforcing discipline. Hopefully, while letter transcribing is going on, I’ll be able to finish the old family photos project and get my next Bible study edited and published.
