Category Archives: Genealogy

books, career, Engineering, Genealogy, memories

Weary Work

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Into he trash went my engineering seals, lead sharpener for engineering drawing work, and service anniversary pins.

The main work I’m doing now—work at home that is, but not including my writing and stock trading work—is shedding possessions in anticipation of future downsizing. It’s wearying work. Not so much physically wearying, but mentally so. For a couple of months we’ve been pulling books from the basement and listing them for sale on Facebook Marketplace. We’ve sold a fair number, though have many more to go.

We have cleared out a fair number of things. We donated 400 children’s books to a church function. With our son’s and daughter’s help, on separate trips here, we took at least three loads of donation stuff to Goodwill. That included some odd pieces of furniture.

Some day I’ll have to actually read this old probate document and see how it fits in with family history.

One thing I was doing, but which was delayed by my hospitalizations and recuperation, was scanning my genealogy papers, saving them electronically in a retrievable manner, and getting rid of the paper files. This week I got back to that project, and over three days got rid of around 50 sheets. Some of those sheets were probate records from Massachusetts in the 1600s and 1700s that I had my son research years ago. The sheets are difficult to read, and I don’t really remember how some of the people fit into our family tree. I’ll have to transcribe the probate documents and figure out exactly who the people are (ancestors or relatives). That’s something I can do from the electronic files better than the paper files, because I can enlarge the e-docs and read them easier. But when will I ever take the time to do this additional step?

You know dis-accumulation cuts deeply if I’m getting rid of Carlyle books.

Another thing that we did in the storeroom was pull out our daughter’s old bedroom set, unused for at least 10 years, and little used for 20 years before that. We snapped some photos and I listed it for sale. Only one person showing interest so far.

With the bedroom set pulled out and on display, this allowed me to reorganize stuff. I moved an old entertainment center and restacked stuff around it. That allowed me to see what stuff we have, and gave me an idea of what we can get rid of soon with the greatest reduction in volume. Those would be the old VHS tapes.

Some of the things I’m going through are cutting deep. In a box of things I brought home from the office, I found my professional engineer seals. It took me a few minutes to make the decision to put them in the trash. The seals meant a lot to me when I was a practicing engineer, but that ended close to four years ago (retirement followed by two years on retainer. I also found a large roll of discarded engineering drawings that I salvaged with the intent of using the backs to draw big genealogy charts. But I now know that’s not going to happen, so the paper roll is moved to recycling staging. Last week I tossed twenty-five years of continuing education certificates and a couple of stacks of my old business cards. Next will be my many organization membership and annual licensing cards.

One big space keeper is my old stamp collection. After years of storing it in the storeroom, I’ve decided to get rid of it. I don’t know if it has any value these days. Does anyone still collect stamps? Are dealers out there and are they buying? Or is it possible to find a private collector?  So much work to do.

Downsizing, which requires dis-accumulation, has become more important now that I’ve had health issues. My recovery from heart surgery is going well (including three days a week in cardio-rehab), recovery from my last stroke less so. But clearly my health is not what it was a year ago. We’ve got to cut deeply into our possessions, got to. We are leaner than we were a year ago, and significantly leaner than we were four years ago. But we have much much more to do.

All this is quite wearying. Dealing with the genealogy papers is more wearying than anything. Each piece of paper I toss in the recycling basket feels like I’ve parted with something I should keep, something that someone among my descendants may want or benefit from someday. Ah, well, in the future the Internet will contain so many records and resources that my paltry files may have no value.

Tonight, after dealing with books for about an hour, I pulled two genealogy notebooks off the closet shelf and went through them. They were mostly forms for copying information on. I kept two of each kind of sheet and discarded the rest. I did keep any lined sheets without writing on the front or back (maybe 20 of them), as who knows what I could use them for someday.

expatriate life, family, Genealogy, letters

Progress on Two Special Projects

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Genealogy papers on the left, Saudi letters (from 1982) on the right.

With the after-effects of the stoke having slowed my typing, I’ve now for just under a week been back to writing. Typing is still slow, but improving. It’s good to be back in the saddle. That doesn’t mean just on writing, but also on two special projects.

One of those is continuing to scan my genealogy research papers and safe them electronically. I’ve blogged about this before. More than half of my notebooks are culled and the contents either digitized or discarded. But all the easy parts are done. Most of what’s left are for the four family lines I spent the most time on in my research. I’m having to go through them more carefully. Some of the papers, mainly original documents I obtained, I’ll still save after scanning.

I worked on this last Friday and Saturday. I found that my electronic file saving system works, but also that I had a lot more folders to add. Saturday, beginning work on a new notebook, I realized I had in it mainly ancestors for whom I had no electronic folders. Since my folders are alphabetized first on Ahnentafel number, and also indicate the generation of the ancestor, it takes some time to get the folders properly created. Most of my time Saturday was spent on folder creation and organization, but did get some papers scanned, saved, and discarded.  I also managed to scoop up about a half-dozen sheets that needed filing elsewhere (i.e. not in a genealogy notebook that’s a keeper) and got them filed. It’s those stragglers that are always a hindrance to keeping my work area clean.

The other special project is transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, 1981-1983. I did this for the Kuwait years, 1988-1990 (and some after that) and put them in a book for family members. I blogged about that several times.

Now I’m on the Saudi letters. It’s quite different. No displacement due to war; the kids were little so no letters by them; no phone so we wrote more letters; but no computer so they were all handwritten.

I collected the letters into one bin and collated them some time ago. In early January (I think it was), I began transcribing 1981 letters. They were all done except for the two Christmas letters we sent that year, and one or two more, when I had my stroke. So, before I started back on my writing work, I knuckled down and, with my right hand still typing-impaired, got them done about a week and a half ago.

The total count for the seven months in 1981 was 53 unique letters. There were other items in the bind, but mainly empty envelopes and duplicate letters, where we photocopied a letter and sent it to several people, usually with a personal note attached.

I pulled out the box of letters for 1982 in preparation for the next phase of this task. I counted 75 letters, I think it was (some of them postcards), and some possibly duplicates. A few envelopes felt like they might have been empty. The stack for 1983 looks about the same size.

I don’t have a deadline for either of these projects. The end of 2024 is sort of a loose goal, and, I think, very doable so long as I don’t get lazy. And so long as my regular writing and home upkeep doesn’t overpower my time.

Bible study, Carlyle, Church History Novels, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, poetry, The Candy Store Generation

2024: Possible Writing Projects

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In my last post, recapping my 2023 writing work, I said that my next post would be goals for 2024. But before I set those goals, I want to take a moment to think through all the writing projects I have going. Some are actually in progress, some are close to the surface, others were started and buried in the past. Still others are nascent, just starting to come together in my mind. They may never get beyond the idea stage, but they are there. I need to talk through this, think about what I can accomplish given life constraints. Bear with me though this thinking-out-loud post.

So here are the projects worth putting in the mix for actual goals for 2024.

  • Finish editing A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. I’m almost there right now.
  • Write Parts 2, 3, and 8 of A Walk Through Holy Week. Publish Part 2.
  • Pull Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution into book form and publish it as a stand-alone book.
  • Reasearch (and possibly write) the next book in the Documenting America series. I have two possibilities for what the next one will be. Both need reading for research.
  • The next book in the Church History Novels series. I’ve identified what it will be and have brainstormed the plot. But nothing is yet on paper.
  • Transcribe the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia—maybe just half of them this year.
  • Next book in The Forest Throne series. I have made a minor start on it and discussed the plot with my granddaughter, who is my consultant on this volume. But this is unlikely to happen in 2024, unless it’s late in the year and after much other work is completed.
  • Begin the Alfred Cottage mysteries. I have made a minor start on the first volume and have planned out the series.
  • Update The Candy Store Generation for recent data and republish. I think this is about a two-week project.
  • Flesh out One Of My Wishes, a hoped-for poetry book. I made a start on this and have it half done. But the hard part remains.
  • A genealogy book. I’m torn between two books in the Cheney family. One has much research done and is mainly writing left. The other requires research from scratch.
  • One of the two books about Thomas Carlyle I’ve started. One I think I could have done with a month of intense work. The other I started and laid aside so many years ago, I’m not sure where I was on it, though possibly 60 percent done.
  • And last, take some time to decide what to do about a tentative project, Nature, The Artwork Of God. I’ve been thinking about this for a few months. It seems like it would be a good book. In some ways it’s a bit scary to think I could write a book that blends science and religion, so I’m going to take a long time to ponder this. I think that at most this year I’ll complete some reading research and flesh out a table of contents.

I’m not saying all of these are things I’ll work on in 2024. I’m just trying to figure out what are real prospects for this year. For sure I’ll be pondering these projects over the next few days, as I have been for nearly two weeks, and will have some firm goals for the year set in my next post.

Bible study, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, self-publishing

December Progress, January Goals

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Time to post about my progress in December and set some goals for January. I know, I know, December isn’t over yet. Maybe I should wait until January 1st to post this. But I’m doing it now, and will either edit it or provide updates in a comment.

  • Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday. I did this, though at least once I was a day late, and another time I didn’t write it until late in the day.
  • Attend three writers meetings. I’m not sure the third one will be held, as it will be getting close to Christmas. We cancelled the third one, a combination of sickness, travel, and Christmas. I attended the other two.
  • Finish the first draft and much of the editing of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. …If I can maintain my writing schedule, I should finish the writing by December 10. That gives me two weeks to edit, enough time to go through the whole thing once. I finished the writing Dec 13 and the edits to the Introduction on Dec 14. Editing commenced Dec 15 and…I completed it around Dec 21.
  • Type up some of the ideas for book 3 in The Forest Throne series. I don’t intend to begin actually writing this for perhaps a year, but I want to lock in the ideas generated so far. I did this, after having contacted my granddaughter for some clarifications of ideas we considered during Thanksgiving week.
  • Work some on Nature: The Artwork of God. This may be the next book I write (still trying to decide), so I need to expand the notes I’ve already taken. As of today, I did nothing on this in December.
  • Finish the new Danny Tompkins short story and decide what to do with it. I finished it and sent it to two beta readers. Still waiting to hear back from them.
  • Read for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Actually, until I do my research, I don’t know what the next one will be.  I did a little reading on this beginning Dec 26. I’m not very far along, however.
  • Oh, one more: Finish and submit my article on a genealogical brick wall to the NWA Genealogical Society. The contest deadline is Dec 31. The article has been done for almost two months. Time to dust it off and do a final edit. I did this and submitted it on Dec 8, though I had to submit an extra couple of reference documents later. Now, I wait.

What about goals for January? I’m going to hold off on them until I post goals for the year 2024, which I’ll do on January 1. I’ll probably post specific goals for January on January 5.

Bible study, Genealogy, miscellaneous

Two Tasks Done

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I asked my granddaughter to do a sketch for the covers for the Bible study series. This is her first cut at it.

My to-do list remains long. About every two weeks I start a new one, taking the one just done, transferring uncompleted tasks to the new list, and adding more. I suppose the habit is a continuation of my engineering career, and hard to break. Yet, I’m sure thinks would fall through the cracks if I didn’t organize the things I need to do. Like this morning, as I’m writing this in The Dungeon, I see on my computer desk a business card for the auto dealership where I have our vehicles serviced and realize I need to add calling them to have our minivan in for an oil change.

This week, I finished two tasks that I will today cross off the list. The first was writing A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. It’s always good when I finish a book. As I work on a book, I will add it to my to-do list. The entry for this one would look something like:

  • write AWTHW   M   T   W   R   F   Sa

Each day I would then cross out the day as I did my writing work.  I may have a future blog post that says more about the specifics of how this book came about, how the writing went, etc. Suffice to say for now that it came together fairly quickly.

Now the editing starts. I’ve been editing as I wrote, so I’m a little further along than I would typically be with most books at the first draft stage. Last night I emailed it to my beta reader, so things are truly in motion. My next to-do list will have this entry:

  • edit AWTHW  M   T   W   R   F   Sa

Before too long, I’ll have a to-do list with the following:

  • create publication files for AWTHW

As for the second task, that is to finish scanning a large notebook of genealogy papers, saving them to my electronic filing system, and discarding the files and the notebook. This is part of a larger project to reduce the amount of possessions we would have to move in a future downsizing—an event that is not on any to-do list and is unlikely to be for a couple of years. I’ve already done that to 15 or so notebooks before this one.

This notebook contained information on relatives in Lynda’s paternal like, the Cheney family. It was kind of a difficult task. My electronic filing system is really set up for ancestors, not relatives. Therefore, I found this notebook harder to deal with than the others.

But I figured out a way to get relatives in an ancestors filing system. I don’t remember when I started on this task. The notebook is (or rather, was) thick, with loose papers as well. It was probably two months ago that this item first appeared on my to-do list:

  • scan/save/discard Cheney relatives papers   M   T   W   R   F   Sa

I took several breaks when other tasks took precedence, such as when family was here over Thanksgiving. But my revised filing system worked, and slowly the notebook emptied out. I finished the last of the bound papers on Wednesday, leaving only the loose papers to go.

Alas, yesterday the scan-to-computer function quit working. I’m not a tech guy, but I was able, in about 20 to 30 minutes, do some diagnostics and get the scanner and computer recognizing each other’s existence and get back to scanning. I got a few more pages done, leaving only around ten loose papers for today. As I won’t be doing any book writing today, I should easily be able to get all those done and check this task off the list.

Of course, that will not be the end for these two over-arching tasks. My to-do list is upstairs. Next time I go up, I’ll find it and bring it down to The Dungeon. I have two new items to add to it.

  • edit AWTHW   F   Sa   M   T   W   R
  • begin scanning next genealogy notebook

So one task leads to another, and the to-do lists never end. Still, I’m feeling good about things. I’m slowly getting done what I need to do.

America, Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, miscellaneous, Short Stories, The Forest Throne, Uncategorized

November Progress, December Goals

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Ah, the first of the month comes on a regular blogging day. Perfect time to address progress and set some goals. First, the November progress.

  • As always, blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I missed one day, Friday of Thanksgiving week. Otherwise, I had a meaningful blog post on each scheduled day. 
  • Attend three writers group meetings. I managed to do this. Thought I was going to miss one, but was able to make all three.
  • Finish editing Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, and schedule all chapters to publish to Kindle Vella. Yes! I got this done. All are published to Kindle Vella, no one is spending any money to read them. Alas.
  • Finish the first draft of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. This will be a stretch, but I should get close. No, did not quite get this done. As of yesterday’s writing, I still have a little over two chapters to go. I lost more than a week over Thanksgiving. Before that, I had a hard time with some of the writing, often missing my daily goal, occasionally having to spend the day in study and write nothing. But that’s okay; it was still progress in small steps.
  • Get a little more done on the ideas for The Artwork of God. I’m still in the research stage on this project. Ideas continue to come, so I guess I met this goal. I didn’t put much on paper, however, just brainstorming it. Found a couple of good quotes to go in it. So the goal was met, but just barely.
  • Begin writing down some plot ideas for the next volume in The Forest Throne series. My granddaughter and I sat and talked about this one day while she was here. I told her my ideas and she gave me feedback as well as some of her ideas. Since the book will be about the girl in the Wagner family, I will really need her help.

Now, what about goals for December? It’s the time I’ll have to try to get much done to meet my goals for the year. I haven’t looked at those for a long time. But, without looking back, here’s what I hope to accomplish this month.

  • Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday.
  • Attend three writers meetings. I’m not sure the third one will be held, as it will be getting close to Christmas.
  • Finish the first draft and much of the editing of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. As I said above, I’m down to the last couple of chapters. If I can maintain my writing schedule, I should finish the writing by December 10. That gives me two weeks to edit, enough time to go through the whole thing.
  • Type up some of the ideas for book 3 in The Forest Throne series. I don’t intend to begin actually writing this for perhaps a year, but I want to lock in the ideas generated so far.
  • Work some on Nature: The Artwork of God. This may be the next book I write (still trying to decide), so I need to expand the notes I’ve already taken.
  • Finish the new Danny Tompkins short story and decide what to do with it.
  • Read for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Actually, until I do my research, I don’t know if this will be the next one or not.
  • Oh, one more: Finish and submit my article on a genealogical brick wall to the NWA Genealogical Society. The contest deadline is Dec 31. The article has been done for almost two months. Time to dust it off and do a final edit.
family, Genealogy, home improvements, miscellaneous

Grinding

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Dateline: Sunday, 12 Nov 2023

From time to time, life gets so busy that I fall back to a habit that served me well in my engineering career: making a to-do list. Not that my days are really so busy that I miss deadlines, doctor appointments, club meetings, etc. Those are relatively few in number, and easily remembered—at least those happening in the next month are.

But as I look around the house, I see lots of things that need doing. Some are small things, but they pile up. It is a needed task to clean up as much as I can before company comes Thanksgiving week. Here in The Dungeon, if I look over to the left, the worktable with our printer has piles of papers. The biggest pile is scrap paper, being kept for printing drafts of my writing for proofreading or critiques. It’s ugly, but it’s going to stay. Next to it is a notebook of genealogy files that I’m slowly scanning and saving to the cloud so that I can get rid of the paper. Also on that table are a few miscellaneous papers that I need to file. One is a charitable donation receipt I need to put with the 2021 tax returns. So far I haven’t felt like dedicating the two minutes needed to do that.

That work table also has two bank statements to file. That’s another two minute task I just haven’t felt like doing.

A little farther away are bookshelves lining the basement family room walls. At one time these were nice and neat, separated into fiction and nonfiction, and alphabetized. They may still be mostly that way, but years of reading and re-shelving, selling or donating, pulling other books from boxes, have resulted in some loose of organization. Fortunately, correcting that, while a big task, isn’t urgent.

What is urgent? Filing receipts! I suppose that’s number one. Many things I used to file have gone digital. Yet there’s still a big pile of them to file. Most of them are medical, the papers you get with each prescription. Some are medical info, others are receipts. Others are grocery store receipts, travel receipts, a few insurance statements, and a few brokerage papers that we haven’t yet switched over to digital. Once I set my mind to it, I can have these all sorted, ordered by date, and filed in about two hours. Maybe that will be a Monday task.

Then there are all the things involved with home repairs. We are inching forward with gutter and downspout replacement. My water damage restoration contractor bailed on me, so I’m having to go through it all again with a new one. I hope to hear something this week from him. And I still need to get the floor guy out here to figure out if I’ll be able to change out the ancient wall-to-wall carpet with modern flooring after all the other work is done. I guess I need to carve out a little time today to figure out which number I called was him and call to set up an inspection time.

Then there’s flu shots. We normally get them in early October, but couldn’t this year and I haven’t made appointments since then. That might be a today task as I can do that online. Oh, and the Silver Dragon need some routine servicing. I think Wednesday is free, if I can make an appointment on Monday. Oh, year, just remembered: I have some over the counter things to order as part of our Medicare Advantage Plan benefits. Better do that today as well.

Somewhere in there I need to work in some stock trading. The latter is mostly Monday through Friday, only 15 min to a half hour a day, plus an hour wrap-up on Saturday.

See why I need a to-do list? I have to grind through these things, trying to get everything done without letting something fall through the cracks.

I’m going to end this blog post here, and do those on-line things while I can. I hope on Friday I can post that I got lots done, and feel less stressed about everything.

family, Genealogy

Will I Ever See It Again?

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Genealogy charts like this for my wife’s ancestry: will I ever see them again?

There have been times in my life when I got a foreboding that I was doing something for the last time.

The first time it happened was when I flew out of Boston in 1990. We were back in the USA after Iraq invaded Kuwait, living back in Asheboro NC, waiting for the situation to clear. I took temporary employment with Metcalf & Eddy in a Boston suburb, and flew up once a month for a three-week stay in their guest house. I flew back to NC in November and, as we looped around the city after takeoff from Logan airport, I remember thinking, will I ever see Boston again?

The was probably foolish thinking. I was only 38 years old. My dad and brother still lived in Rhode Island. I should have realized I would have many more times to be in Boston. But that was the feeling I had.

The next time was leaving Kuwait in July 1991, out of the severely damaged airport. That was an accurate foreboding, as I’ve never gone back there.

I start working on this notebook today.

It happened in 2010 when I was in Rhode Island for my 40-year high school reunion. My brother was hospitalized. He looked awful. A new health problem had recently developed, compounding three other major problems. I remember thinking as I left the hospital that I thought he had less than 5 years to live. In fact, he didn’t make two years, and my premonition was correct.

Now that I’m a lot older, I get those forebodings more frequently. Every time we make a trip to a home town or old haunt, I can’t help but think, “Will I ever see this place, or these people, again?”

But I generally can put those thoughts out of my mind. Is this the last car I’ll ever own? Is this my last big vacation? Is this my last long-distance drive? Yes, I set those thoughts aside and concentrate on what I have.

13 notebooks emptied, ready to be brought up to the staging area for donations.

I had just such a foreboding yesterday. Not about people or places but about a thing. Or actually a bunch of things: my genealogy research papers. I think I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, at least in the Progress and Goals posts. I had a lot a lot of genealogy papers. I made it a practice to write everything down as I researched. I came up with filing systems and reorganized. Then, as the 3-ring binders seemed to reproduce themselves like fruit flies (but taking up much more space), I carved out a shelf in my closet for them. Six feet of glorious space to put notebook after notebook.

Except the shelf filled and I had to lay some horizontally on top of the others. Then, my interests began to change and I spent much more time on writing than on genealogy. So many of my notes were incomplete. Even as research became easier as more and more records were placed on the internet, many for no-cost searching, I did less and less.

Every now and then I’d hear from a relative, the old obsession would rear up and I’d research in a frenzy for a week or two then…back to writing, with another twenty or thirty papers stuffed into an already over-stuffed notebook.

Now, as we are in the process of disaccumulating in advance of a future downsizing, as I looked around for what I could get rid of next, I spied the shelf in the closet and realized that row of notebooks were something I couldn’t keep.

But what to get rid of, what to keep? What to save, what to trash? How to get rid of the bulk of those papers without destroying my research, just in case someone in the future cared to know what I had learned about the family?

I’ll try to make this short. I first went through the notebooks and pulled out any sheet with a name on it that had no further information. To recycling. Next I took a hard look at some family lines that I had a little research on but which I never did a whole lot of research on. Out they went. This, if I remember correctly, got rid of three notebooks after consolidation.

That left around 25 notebooks—still way too much. I knew I had to digitize these papers and save them to the computer. But how to do it, and how to save them so that they would be findable in the unlikelihood they would ever be needed again, either by me or by a descendant?

I had only recently discovered that my printer was also a scanner, and that it had options such as scan to PDF, jpg, or to text. I had already been using it to scan printout of letters and e-mails. I could just shift a little and use it for genealogy papers.

That’s what I’ve been doing for a lot of 2023. I made it a goal to scan and trash 10 sheets a day from the notebooks. That would be over seven reems of paper in a year. It took me a while to get going. I figured out a way to save everything digitally so that I could find everything again. About five more notebooks into the process, I realized my filing system was a bit cumbersome and was slowing down the work. It took me a week or two of experimentation before I figured out a better way.

With that better way, and with old Betsey (the name I just gave to my scanner) cranking away, I discovered I could easily scan and trash 20 sheets a day, taking relatively little time. Now I was up to close to 15 reems a years. That would make a real dent on that closet shelf.

Yesterday was a catching up day. I scanned 57 sheets and filed the electronic files. That emptied one more binder. I set it on the floor under my worktable with the others, all waiting to be carried out of The Dungeon and to the garage staging area for things to be donated. Right now it’s 13 notebooks. I’ve already donated a few earlier in the year, and I think it’s 18 that have been cleaned out and declared surplus.

Ah, but I was talking about forebodings. Yesterday, as I scanned and filed all those papers—many showing incomplete research, I got the sense that I might never see them again. Will the time arise that will allow me to expand the research? And will it come to a point where I no longer care?

So that’s where I’m at today. Did I save my “darlings”, or kill them, as Hemingway famously advised writers to do? Time will tell.

book reviews, family, Genealogy, History

Book Review: Letters From Muskoka

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The book is available in modern reprints. My copy was a free e-book of the original, out-of-copyright edition.

Some years back, after twenty years of searching, I finally “found” my maternal grandfather. I had a last name and diminutive first name, but no location. A few hints that my grandmother gave, along with DNA triangulation at 23andMe, and in August 2017 I finally confirmed Herbert Stanley “Bert” Foreman as the man, and his birthplace as Port Carling, Muskoka, Ontario, Canada.

The genealogy research went fast, as did finding cousins. The library at Port Carling was incredibly helpful with making copies of book pages for me. With the location being totally knew to me (now mainly a vacation area north of Toronto), I began to look for and acquire books about the area. The ones I got were available on line through Google Books as they were out of copyright. I downloaded four books, and the first one I read was Letters From Muskoka by “an Emigrant Lady”.

I read this several years ago, probably back in 2018, but, being somewhat less familiar with Google Books than I am now, I didn’t save it to my library there. Also, I find that I’m not as prompt at reviewing books I read as e-books, and hence I never reviewed it. This week, wanting to catch up on book reviews, I went looking for “that Muskoka book I read a few years ago” and didn’t find it. Fortunately, through a simple search I found it. In order to write a review of it, I had to give it a bit of a re-read. Mainly, I scrolled ahead to this haunting passage I remembered from the end of the main narrative:

I went into the Bush of Muskoka strong and healthy, full of life and energy, and fully as enthusiastic as the youngest of our party. I left it with hopes completely crushed, and with health so hopelessly shattered from hard work, unceasing anxiety and trouble of all kinds, that I am now a helpless invalid, entirely confined by the doctor’s orders to my bed and sofa, with not the remotest chance of ever leaving them for a more active life during the remainder of my days on earth.

What a sad commentary on her years there. She, a serviceman’s widow for fifteen years, and her adult children were Brits who were living in France when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. When the war ended in 1870, changes in the country made life there less attractive for these British expats. One daughter and family had emigrated to Muskoka, and most of the rest decided to follow.

When the book was first published in 1878 in England, the author was listed as “An Emigrant Lady”. Later editions identified her as Harriet Barbara (Mrs. Charles) Gerard King. She was a widow with four children, at least two adults. At the end of the war, they decided to emigrate to Canada to take up free land being offered in Muskoka. Harriet was 61 at this time.

They arrived in Muskoka, after a major ocean storm in transit, after train delays, after finding themselves without money, in fall of 1871. The hardships began almost immediately, and did not abate for the next four years. Here are other salient quotes from the book.

It was anguish to see your sisters and sister-in-law, so tenderly and delicately brought up, working harder by far than any of our servants in England or France.

We were rich in nothing but delusive hopes and expectations, doomed, like the glass basked…to be shattered and broken to pieces.

A portrait of Harriet, I suspect after she left Muskoka in 1876, more likely shortly before her death in 1885.

Normally I don’t have much sympathy for or interest in those who are, or think they are, part of the aristocracy. They have their good things in life and don’t need my sympathy. But it’s hard to read this and not have a little sympathy for the emigrant lady. In the last day or two, as I read on in the book, I learned that she was a writer and tried to bring income in by writing and submitting articles. At this, she was mostly unsuccessful.

The letters take up the bulk of the book, with a few ancillary sections. I’m not sure that I read beyond the letters. Mrs. King described in great detail the hardships in getting a farm cut out of the rocky woods. All family members saw their health deteriorate due to the hard work and the meagerness of the provisions.

The book did what I wanted it to do: help me to understand the area my long-lost grandfather came from. As I wrote this review, I can see I need to finish the last few short sections of the book. I’ll download it to my phone and begin reading it in the off moments. Then, when I’m sure I finished it, I have three other books about old Muskoka to read. So I’d better get on it.

Unless you have a connection to Muskoka, or you really, really like pioneer stories, there’s no point in reading this. For me, it was a great book. The detail and the quality of the writing make this a 5-star book—for me. For most people, it’s maybe a 3-star book. But, in the beauty of e-books, I’ll keep it in my library for a while.

Genealogy, miscellaneous

The Living or the Dead

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My wife and I had an interesting conversation Saturday night. We were talking about someone we knew in the past, from our church in Kansas City. I wasn’t sure who she meant at first, and I mentioned another couple from the same era and same church. Except I couldn’t remember the wife’s name of the second couple. We talked about it and together were able to remember both couples’ names.

The couple I first brought up was somewhat older than us. When he retired from the railroad, they moved from Kansas City to somewhere in southern Missouri. around Springfield. We had their contact info at one time but have lost it. I wondered, though, since they were at least 10 years older than us, if they were still alive. Was there a way to find out?

I searched for obituaries for them, then searched finagrave.com, a site where I’ve had great success finding dead people there, in my research for genealogy and for the church Centennial book. I looked in those places and…nothing. The couple didn’t show up in any searches. That may mean they are still alive and well and living in southern Missouri. Or it could mean they simply didn’t show up in searches. I then tried searching for them among the living and couldn’t find them there either.

Being unconclusive, Lynda said something about why I searched for them at findagrave, a site she hadn’t heard of before. I replied, “I’ve had more success finding the dead than the living.”

That was a catchy way of saying, perhaps, what my preferences are when searching for people. The dead don’t argue with you. They don’t talk back or insult you. They don’t take political sides or belittle someone you like. They also don’t ignore you when you find them.

Obviously, expectations are different when searching for the living. If you do find someone you’re looking for, it’s likely you try to contact them and, if successful, you hope for an answer. Alas, that answer often is not forthcoming. But, when you search for the dead, if you find them you learn something about them. If they left many footprints, they speak to you through those footprints. It’s not much of a conversation, however.

Maybe that’s why I enjoy looking for the dead so much. You learn a lot without engaging in conversation. The fewer conversations in any given day usually makes it a better day for me. Maybe that’s why I’ve enjoyed genealogy so much over the years. It’s coaxing dead people to talk to you, but without actual conversation—if that makes sense.

This isn’t much of a post, but it’s what’s in my head right now. Perhaps I’ll do better on Friday.