Day 142

I wish I had an interesting blog for today. Faint microfilm - white handwriting on black paper - makes for a long day of slogging. I found and copied several early deeds (1797) from several family members but nothing too exciting.

I didn't get to the Draper Papers until 3pm - 1 hour before closing. The Archives only has some of the manuscripts so I had to pick and choose a person to research from within the "Kentucky Papers" (versus the Boone papers, etc.) I went for Nancy Letcher. Locating the correct roll of film is almost as challenging as locating the filmed manuscript. It involves searching the appendices for the correct access number, then locating the appendix for the correct portion of the manuscript, then using your decoder ring to deduce the access number which in turn gives you the targeted microfilm reel. Today - #501! Once loaded, you realize that there are 4 volumes CC 33, 34, 35, and 36 on the microfilm. Thank goodness I wanted CC33. However, there is no index. You simply read every handwritten entry, looking for a reference to or letter from Nancy Letcher. In some ways this resembles the Nathan Goold research on the Tukey genealogy in Maine - only worse. Mr. Draper was trying to put the pre-1830 genealogy together for an entire state. On the positive side, the entries are in chronological order. On the down side, the letter I was looking for was dated Sept. 29, 1884 - after starting in 1880. I finally found Nancy Letcher - only to discover that the letter was from a very rude Nancy Letcher who lived in Covington, KY, was granddaughter to a famous pioneer, Thomas Kennedy of Covington - and who are not our Thomas Kennedy or Nancy Letcher at all. (I had to sort out this conundrum several months ago.). Thank goodness - we didn't want anyone that rude anyway.

Tomorrow - off to the KY Historical Society to make inroads on as many surname files as possible. Hopefully, I will have some more personal ancestral tidbits to share!