The day started with a bang. I delved right in and bored John and Muriel to death with the genealogy to date. Photos, stories, by 10am they were nodding. However, they rallied! Muriel began hunting for dates and names on her side of the family. She spend an hour on the phone with her mother in Belgium. Now everything was said in French but I am SURE they discussed nothing but family history. Bottom line, we have names, dates, places, an uncle doing research on ancestry.com and her mother's commitment to talking to the 90 year old aunt, finding more stories to add to our stash. (Both the mother and the aunt lived through WWII in Belgium so the stories should be priceless.)
John, not to be left out, is tackling finding the original John Tukey's parents in England. There is great controversy about whether John Tukey came to the US in 1744 or whether he was born in Massachusetts and came to Maine in 1744. The jury is out, no own seems to have absolute proof. It is one of the "brick walls" to tackle in Maine. Meanwhile, John has emailed the church where one potential set of parents for John Tukey were married in 1716, Staffordshire, England.
In the middle of all this, Rick Kimble arrived. He is a cousin on my mother's side and temporarily living in the Philadelphia area. He drove to Chambersburg, arriving in time for lunch and more genealogy stories. After lunch, we had a great tour of the new Wilson College Science building. What a great facility and John's office is neater than I ever remember dad's.
Today's accomplishment - 20+ more names in the database and 3 more people infected with the genealogy bug. At this rate we will have a whole army of family history investigators. An empire!!!!!
Your empire has grown to include Aunt Lois, who has been moved ot open a Google account so that she can communicate with The Blog. I thought that she had sent a comment tonight (Monday) but perhaps it was sent with respect to an earlier posting.
ReplyDeleteSo send her a shout out in some way, to encourage her...