Family Photo Fun

This is the only image I have of our Great-g-g-grandpa, James Hicks of Washington County, Tenn. He was born in 1841 in Jonesboro, Washington Co., TN and died in 1915 there.
When I got this photo from my cousin Linda who, in turn, got it from Lyla Dawn, I noticed that James Hicks is sitting out in a yard somewhere.
When I looked to the bottom to see where the photo was taken, I found Gate City, VA. Shipley was the photographer.

Now the interesting thing is, James Hicks lived in Washington County TN his whole life, as far as we know [except for his enlistment with I Co., 8th Tenn Cav.] We don't know of his having ever lived out of the state of Tennessee [census confirm that he was residing in Washington County at least every ten years].
So what was he doing having a photo taken in a yard in Gate City, VA?

I decided I needed to know where Gate City was. Looking it up on the www.rootsweb.com
city/county locater I quickly discovered Gate City is in Scott County.
Hummm.
Looking for it on a map from Google images search engine, I find that Scott County VA and Washington County, TN weren't anywhere near each other!
So what was James doing up there?

The Shipley name is familiar to our family because Rhetta Shipley married George G. Hicks, one of James and Matilda's sons. Rhetta was the daughter of Adam and Elizabeth Robinson Cox Shipley - they also lived in Washington County, TN. No Shipley relations living in Scott County, VA that I can find.

So what was James Hicks doing there in Gate City, VA having his photo taken during his later years? He looks to be in his early or mid 50's in this photo. The card type and the clothes he is wearing support that idea.
The beard is "the scraggly beard those guys wore in those days," my Dad commented. This was a style Civil War vets commonly kept even in their later years.

Since I didn't get any answers looking for Hicks, Hix or Shipley in the census for Scott County around this time, I decided to look into photographers that once worked in Gate City, VA.
Nobody has any listings or paperwork for any Shipley photographers in Gate City, VA!

Now I have two mysteries to work on over the next couple of days...

GenForum

The last free genealogy site that I mentioned in today's initial post was GenForum.
http://genforum.genealogy.com
When you get to the home page you will see that there are forums for many many surnames and also forums for states and counties!
These are forums where other genealogy researchers are posting queries and/or information related to that surname or counties and states where those family members lived.

I can spend hours looking through the sites related to my ancestors.
For Fred and Susan T Knowles Brown there are many places to search in GenForum.
Under Surnames
Brown
Knowles
Under States
Ohio
Iowa
Under Counties
Ringgold
or Trumbull
or Ashtabula
(the last two being the counties in Ohio that Fred and Susan lived in prior to moving to Iowa)

This is also a great way to find out about female family members. Women often lost their last name and legal rights under English law.
Write the woman's married surname to bring up that forum, then write her maiden name in the search box related to that particular forum. Often information about their parents or siblings can be found. Then search the surname forum related to her maiden name and use her married surname to find out if others have information about her.

Fun eh?

Using RootsWeb

The second place to search and see if others have posted their information about our ancestors is
www.rootsweb.com
Looking under
Family Trees (World Connect)
one can see
Search Family Trees
This is the place to put in the name of the person we are looking for.
Now if one wrote, Fredrick Brown they would get a list of family trees with various Fred Brown's. If they wrote Iowa as his death place they would narrow results down and among those results would be the family tree I have uploaded.
These family trees are fun to look through and can offer info [always look for real sources to see if the info is true], plus, the person who uploaded the family tree might have left their email for further contact.
This is a free database [sponsored by Ancestry.com] that relies on volunteers uploading their GEDCOMs.
If you use family tree software to record your family findings then you are able to create a GEDCOM and can upload it to sites like these.

Fun, Free Genealogy Searches

Ok, lest everyone think I spend all my time hanging around graveyards, I'll show you some of the research I do to find out about people, when they were living their lives, and what kind of mark they've left behind. [That's what all this about anyway, isn't it?]

And while I'm at it I'll dispel the myth that the only way a person can do online genealogy is to pay for subscription search sites. Not true! These sites are defiantly more direct and make it easier to collect paperwork on the person, but they're not the only route to finding out about our ancestors.

Since I started searching for information about my family I have been a part of
www.usgenweb.com
www.rootsweb.com
and
www.genforum.com

I have contributed transcribed wills and court documents for the Washington County, Tenn GenWeb site. I've contributed photos and transcribed letters to the Nebraska GenWeb county sites. And I've gleaned much information about my own family from others contributions to the various US GenWeb sites.

A good example is my six-times great Grandparents, Fredrick Avery and Susan T. Knowles Brown [seen above]. They were the children of Ohio Reserve Settlers and part of the group that grew up and made their way west to settle in Kellerton, Iowa in 1868.
How did I learn that? I wrote to the Mt Ayr Public Library about Kellerton, Athens and Ringgold County. They sent me back all kinds of good stuff including the section of Arthur Lesan's 1931 book "History of Athens Township." Which just happened to list Kellerton's pioneers and have the above picture of my Brown ancestors! That very same information can now be found under Ringgold County on the Iowa GenWeb site.
http://iagenweb.org/ringgold/history/hist-kellertonroots.html
Someone volunteered the information and the Ringgold site manager [who is also a volunteer] put it up for everyone to see.

This is a good way to find out about the places our family lived and what part they played in the area's history.

And sometime a searcher my find that the county they are searching has nothing about their family members. Well, if they have some info they have saved, they might think about making that information available to the county volunteer maintaining the pages where their ancestors lived. Then those coming along behind can be delighted by the discovery of that contribution!

Memorial Day photos

Dad and I went out to the local cemeteries to take Memorial Day photos.
The strange one was the car show being held at the Grand Junction Memorial Gardens.
This was amongst the hot dog grill and the hamburger line under the shade of some large trees near a little lake.
"Kinda' inaproprate to have a car show here, isn't it?" Dad asked.
"Well, this is the cemetery's efforts to get the living more involved with the dead. Many cemeteries are having tours or events to draw people."
We walked past some stones and I left Dad talking to the owner of a 57 Chevy while I moved around the lake to get a shot of the bagpiper.

Google Earth and Graveyards

Ok, the last for today, but the best fun I've had with GPS and photographs.
Google Earth is a genealogy researchers best friend!
You can look up those mysterious places you've never seen, maybe even a place where your ancestor lived [I toured Paris, France one day!].

The latest fun I've been having is looking for those cemeteries where I have ancestors buried. Of course we cant see what it was like "then" but we can look at the places now, which is still intriguing to me.

Take the Forest Hill Cemetery in Boston, MA that was just being discussed in my earlier post.
All I do is write the name of the cemetery or town in the "Fly to" Search box. In this case I wrote the name Forest Hills Cemetery in the Business search box.
It came up with an aerial view of the area where the cemetery is located.
From there I can either look for the little photograph icons and see pictures others have taken of landmarks [in this case Sam791 took the photo of the Forest Hills entrance] or I can double click on the aerial view map until I hit ground level, where, if I'm lucky, there are camera icons! This indicates that there have been street level photos taken in sequence of the surrounding area!
I was able to do this for Congress Cemetery in Wayne County, Ohio [the topmost picture].

This all can be printed out and included in my family books. [And I've been spending lots of my extra time looking up these places I've never been to, so I can see where my people once lived!]

Now this won't happen for every place out there. Roosevelt, Oklahoma is one of the graveyards that has no street level pictures because the town is slowly drying up. But you can still tour downtown in places like this. [I looked up Kellerton, Iowa to see where my Great great-great grandparents, Susan T and Fred Brown lived and worked. It was cool!]

Old Stones for African Americans and Others

The search for our ancestors gravesites is not always a simple matter. For those who have African ancestors who where brought to America as slaves in the South, there is a chance that they where buried on the plantations where they labored. Often without the benefit of grave markers. A majority of the time slaves where buried separate from the white families they served in the surrounding woodland or fields.


In the North during the colonial period those African American ancestors that where slaves may have been buried in known graveyards with simple things written on their stones, sometimes a date of death or their first name and "Servant of..." This was another way of saying slave. Wording might be
"Josh Mills
Servant"
or
"Josh
Servant of
Milo Mills."


There where free African Americans living in the New England states back during the colonial period. These people most often would have been buried in separate graveyards from those of the white colonials.
Fairview and Mount Hope Cemetery in Dorchester, Suffolk Co., [Boston] MA two of these burial grounds where started for this reason.
There several notable African Americans are buried in Mount Hope including Roland Hayes, the first commercially successful Black American Classical singer.
Find A Grave Memorial# 27654832
www.findagrave.com

Now an interesting find is at Forest Hills Cemetery. Local historian, Anthony Sammarco, says that buried there are European and African Americans along with other minorities and immigrant ancestors. He says it is an intigrated burial ground - the only limitation was the family's ability to afford burial there. [Economics is still a point of separation, even in death.]

Elma Lewis [shown above] is buried there. 1921 to 2004
She was an Arts Educator and "...In 1950 she founded the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in Roxbury, which taught art, music, drama, costume and dance to the youth of Boston's African-American community for the next forty years."
[Find A Grave Memorial# 8233700]

In many parts of America there are separate burial grounds for our immigrant ancestors. Either because they where not included in the mainstream of society or because they chose to be buried separately to preserve their cultural burial practices from "The Old Country". Often these groups bought land and developed their own burial grounds.
From the Jewish Cemetery Association of Massachusetts site, "...first Jewish cemetery in Massachusetts, Temple Ohabei Shalom Cemetery, founded in 1843. Located in East Boston and home to the largest Jewish population in turn-of-the-century New England."
http://www.jcam.org/Pages/Foundation/foundation_home.htm
This might be the place to look for your Jewish ancestors who settled in Boston.

There are other graveyards that where set up for specific groups, often by those groups. On the west coast of the US, Asian immigrants where not always welcomed with open arms [especially the Chinese] even though they where a major part of the development of the industrial west.
San Francisco was the arrival point for many of our Asian immigrant ancestors who came to work in the gold fields and on the railroads. Many of them died here in the US and their bones did not make it back to China. [There's a disproportionate number of Chinese people buried in Boot Hill in Tombstone, AZ of all places!].

In San Francisco there are many immigrant burial sites:
http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hcmidx.htm
In Texas there was a group of immigrant Germans who where against slavery during the time Texas was Confederate. There was, and still is, a large Jewish population that settled in Texas.

Could your ancestors be in one of these many nation-of-origin specific cemeteries in the US?

Looking at Old Stones

It's irony that I'm sitting here listening to 80's Pop music [some of the liveliest made] while looking up ancestors gravestones.
That's what keeps our family alive though, remembering them and including them in works of today. Above is the marker for my grandmother Betty Blythe Hicks Martin. She dies young in 1967. I never thought much of spending time with graveyards until I went on that trip with Dad. Graveyards, in the daytime, are an indicator of the society and times of our ancestors. Compare the cemetery marker for my grandmother in Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, LA Co., CA Samuel Mason in Kickemuit Cemetery, Warren, Bristol Co., RI. Samuel died in 1744. The European settlers [particularly the Pilgrims] saw death a different way then we look at it today and their gravestones reflect that.
Both of these photos come from Find-a-Grave. This is a great resource for those of us who can't get to these places for whatever reason.
At www.findagrave.com you can use the search to look for individuals graves or for whole cemeteries. Since this is all voluntary you may not find an ancestor's gravesite. This is where you can participate. If you know where the person is buried you can build a memorial for them and either upload a photo of the grave or request that one be taken by the many volunteers connected with Find-a-Grave. I am one for the Grand Junction, Colorado area.
The wonderful vista photo of my Grandma Betty Martin's marker was taken by David [Memorial# 52253524] and the Samuel Mason stone photo was taken by Julie for a memorial [# 21740252]started by one person and now maintained by another.
When you add photos and information about your family members who have passed on, you are keeping their memory alive and making them part of the family for future generations.