Kaleya & her cousin (my brother’s eldest). She is 9 years and she is 4. I love how much alike they look and frankly, it amazes me sometimes.
Category: Memes
Saturday Night Fun This Week
I’m feeling all inspired again with my genealogy blogging! I’ve gotten some great thoughts from reading others’ blogs. For this post, I’m taking Randy up on his last Saturday Night Fun quest, Where Were They in 1909?
The task was as follows:
1) Which of your ancestors were alive in 1909?
2) Tell us where your ancestral families were living in 1909. What country, state, county, city/town, etc. Who was in the family at the time? Use the 1910 census as “close enough.”
3) Have you found each of these families in the 1910 census?
Here is a brief synopsis of my ancesestral families and what they were up to in1909. To keep it simple, I’m going to go three generations back to my great-grandparents.
Barfield & Josephine (Holloway) Koonce - my father’s paternal grandparents were both alive and living in Craven County, North Carolina. The family was from this area. In 1909 they had been married for about six years and had two children, son Hampton and daughter Minnie. The third child that appears in their 1910 census record would not be born until early in 1910.
William Lawhorn Jr. - In 1909, my father’s maternal grandfather was not yet born! He was born August of 1910, so his parents, Sam & Cora (Cox) Lawhorn were close to his arrival as their 3rd child. His parents were also living in Craven County, NC and I have located them in the 1910 census. His future wife, Pearlie Kilpatrick, was not born until 1912. I’ve found her too in 1910.
Lewis “Christopher Columbus” Robinson & Lucinda (Lennon) Robinson – my mother’s paternal grandparents have thus far eluded me in the 1910 census. I periodically search for them, but I’m not sure where to look for them! They were both from the Columbus County area of North Carolina, but by 1920 they’d moved to New York. I do not know for certain when they were married, but their oldest child, Ethel, was born in 1908 in Wilmington, New Hanover County, North Carolina. Their next child was not born for another 5 years. I have located a man that fits his description (age, race, state of birth) in the 1910 census living in Trenton, NY as a hired man, but I’m not sure if this is really him or not. If it is him, I suspect perhaps Lucinda may have been living with family with their young daughter? In any case, I’ve still got some searching to do.
Abraham Lincoln McNair- In 1909, my mother’s maternal grandfather was a 13 year-old boy living in Plymouth, Washington County, North Carolina with his father and five siblings. His mom, Gracy (Bullock) McNair seems to have passed by 1909 and soon after, his father would remarry. His future wife, Martha Jane Walker, was 12 years old, living in the same town, with her own parents, Anthony Walker and Martha Jane Baker and 4 other siblings. I have located both of them in the 1910 census.
So, of my 8 great-grandparents, only two were not yet born in 1909. I obviously have work to do tracking Lewis & Lucinda down in 1910. Very interesting to reflect on this. Thanks Randy!
Weekly Blogging Prompt #18
With life so busy this month, I’ve not had much time for genealogy, so I’m delighted to participate in this week’s blogging prompt. The objective — “Week #18: Showcase a favorite blog or blogger. This is a great way to share some blog love and introduce readers to new genealogy writers.”
For this, I’d like to highlight The Genealogue – but, not just the blog inasmuch as the man behind the blog – Chris. There are of course so many blogs I could name, but I found early on that Chris’ Genealogy Blog Finder is a great way to locate new genealogy blogs and find genealogy blogs on various topics. I find the organization and categorization he uses to be of great help and I appreciate the work he puts into the site. And, his newest site, The Family Historian, is also a wonderful idea and I’ve already passed it along to several others who seek genealogy advice. Thanks Chris for all that you do!
Wordless Wednesday: Pearlie Mae and her Pearls
I have to preface this picture with a few comments. Yesterday, my cousin, the granddaughter of my great-grandmother Pearlie Mae “Julie” Kilpatrick sent me this picture and I am absolutely mesmerized by it. I only have a few pictures of Pearlie Mae and this one is exquisite. She was all dressed up, including a pearl necklace and pearl earrings. My cousin took the picture of the picture w/ a digital camera, hence the glare, but we’ll be getting that edited out soon enough.
The picture was taken after she and my great-grandfather were married in 1931 as she is wearing a ring on her left hand (can’t see it in the photo), so we think the picture was taken soon thereafter. I never knew her, she died when I was not even yet 2 years old, but I do have a memory of being at her house and seeing her in the bed, even though I was so young.
This month’s Carnival of Genealogy topic is “A Tribute to Women;” my scrapbook page is my tribute to Pearlie Mae.
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| From My Digital Scrapbook Layouts |
Music Monday: For Once In My Life
I’m writing this post as a pre-published post, but I was just flipping channels and ran across the movie The Temptations. When I watch this movie, I think of my grandfather Herman. My favorite scene from the movie is when actor Christian Payton (playing Paul), sings “For Once In My Life.”
At the time, I did not know the song, so asked my parents about it and my mother told me that this song as done by Stevie Wonder was one of her father’s absolute FAVORITES! He would play it repeatedly. So, this post is for my grandfather Herman.
Wordless Wednesday: Basketball
My father in 1970 – point guard for the Newbold High School basketball team in Dover, North Carolina. Picture taken from his yearbook.
Research tip for me: consult newspapers from the time period to see if his performance was mentioned 
Wordless Wednesday: I Loved This Dress
Another not so wordless post for Wordless Wednesday
Who: Me
What: Showing off my favorite dress – I LOVED THIS DRESS!
Where: Roswell suberb outside of Atlanta, Georgia where we were living at the time.
When: Late spring 1989, end of my 9th grade year
Why: Evening choir concert for my choir at school. I was at home waiting for a classmate to pick me up. My mother couldn’t take me becuase her car was acting up at the time, so I was going to be there by myself. Well, much to my joy, while performing, I looked in the audience and Mommy was there! I was so happy. On the way home though, the car did almost threaten to turn itself off.
More info than you care about: this same dress was worn by actress Malinda Williams in the 1999 movie, The Wood. The kids were at a school dance and I tripped out when I saw they had this dress for her!
Music Monday: Spooky
This past week, my cousin was in town and I was able to spend time with her – it was great! “Spooky” is her nickname and we are about 7 years apart. Her mom and my grandmother were sisters and when I was younger, my brother and I used to spend weeks at a time visiting there. She used to come visit us too. Spending time with her this past week has been awesome and it’s made me feel young again.
While she was here, she told me the origin of her nickname, which I didn’t know. Her mother chose the nickname from the popular song “Spooky” written by Daniel Ash. It was popular the year she was born. I found the song online.
Now, before you get to the song, this is the perfect day to post about Spooky being Martin Luther King’s holiday; Spooky was born the very same day he was killed – April 4th, 1968.
Here’s Spooky for your listening pleasure, as sung by Dusty Springfield (in the original, the song was about a girl – she changes it to a boy)
Music Mondays: For the Beauty of the Earth
I’m starting a new blog meme for myself – Music Mondays. Music is very important for me, so I thought it would be interesting to document various songs and their association with various events in the family through music.
For my first music monday post, I’d like to share a song that was sung at my maternal grandmother’s high school graduation. She graduated from the Plymouth Colored High School in Plymouth, NC in May of 1944. I am fortunate to have her graduation program and listed on the program the song For the Beauty of the Earth. I found this YouTube video of it being sung by children. It’s a pretty song.
Number 1000
On Saturday night, Randy shared on his blog his experience trying to locate the 1,000th person in his database, and invited us all to do the same. Well, I thought, this should be easy enough. Well, I found them, but it was not as straightfoward as I thought! I use TNG: The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding as my software. I have more than 3300 people in the gedcom associated with my name (i have several other gedcoms too for different research projects)
Attempt #1
TNG has a number of web-based forms that are used for data entry and reports. So, I went first to the webform for the administration of people. The form has a field to enter search criteria, and beneath that is a table of results.
I use this form all the time. But, just now realized that the column headers are not sortable and the order which people are listed by default is not by ID, it is by name.
Attempt #2
Given the database backend of the software, the ID number of each person is included in the URL for that person’s page. For example, my great-grandfather, Barfield Koonce has a URL of http://www.taneya-kalonji.com/family/getperson.php?personID=I26&tree=1. You see in the URL that personID=I26 refers to his ID number in the database. So, I thought, let me just change that to personID=1000 and after doing so I got a broken URL message. Hmm… what’s up with that?
Attempt #3
Since TNG does use a database, I then decided to go look at the database tables themselves. I use phpMyAdmin to administer my MySQL databases on my website, so I have a lot of flexibility for querying fields, running SQL queries and sorting data.
I went specifically to the table of people, limited the results to those in my main gedcom (tree=1) and then sorted by ID number. This is when I realized that the personID numbers skip around, there is no personID=1000. It goes from 973 to 1003. I’m not sure why, but let’s try something else. Let’s look at the 1,000th record in the list, regardless of perosnID.
That person is Vincent Hutchinson. Vincent is my 2nd cousin and is related to me on my maternal grandfather’s side. I’ve never met him, but I do have a picture of him. I don’t even have his birthdate/year. Looks like I need to contact his father again . Last time I spoke to his father was about two years ago.
That was certainly an exercise.