If he needs a new continent that badly, he'd better just get a part-time job owning Apple or something like any other kid.
My hair has gotten long enough in the back to make a cheezy, nasty little ponytail. Elapsed time from medium-reg: eight and a half months.
I don't write much poetry but I just found out my one and only poetry submission is getting published and that's pretty neat.
Mine's long enough for a pony tail for the first time since about 1997. I was in bad need of a cut when the virus hit. I had a friend cut the back off months ago because it was mulleting like hell. It actually looks pretty good, I think.
Hope nobody minds me making the first post here in a week. Today was my second straight day of writing 2,000 words. As I write this, I ave just finished writing a draft of a chapter that has been giving me trouble for ages. Although it needs a few more revisions, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I finally feel like I'm making good progress on this thing.
I just solved a long-running genealogical issue, at least to my satisfaction. My paternal great-grandfather was always known as the "mystery man," having emerged from Ohio in 1883 at the age of 20, married my paternal great-grandmother, left her for the mountains, and dying 10 years later, with no clue as to his own origins, other than a brother and his birth state and date, he and his brother never definitively showing up in any census. After considerable research and sleuthing I have definitively established his precise place of birth and his parents. That was hard, because it turns out after their father died he and his older brother were left to be raised by extended family (mother's family) and not taken along when the mother remarried. I also think I know why he left the family for the mountains -- tuberculosis -- and how he got it (it had been latent, acquired from his father who had also died from it). Old records are hard to research, though much easier now with the internet. Especially because the 1890 U.S. Census records, which might well have proven very helpful, were destroyed in a fire. First firm clue was finding the marriage license of the brother when he married, definitely linking said brother to the birth parents I suspected. Final piece, someone else's family tree that lists the brother and my ancestor to said suspected parents. Oscar, you are a mystery no more.
It’s been rather windy the past few days. I not longer have to rake the leaves in my yard this weekend.
That's one of the downsides of having a fenced back yard -- there's no way for the leaves to get out (or onto my neighbor's lawn); but at the same time my upwind neighbor has a maple tree that towers over my fence and many leaves drift down onto my lawn.
It was challenging and fun -- and absorbing. Key suggestion: keep careful track of the sources you check and what they show -- there's nothing more frustrating than recalling something later but not recalling where you saw it. Ancestry and find-a-grave are very useful (bearing in mind that other people's conclusions might be wrong). Ancestry, BTW. is usually free through your library. I also had a couple old letters and a brief obituary. One mistake I made -- waiting until all the "old folks" are unavailabie.
i use FamilySearch. I find it is more user friendly and has more information than Ancestry. The only thing I had on my great grandfather were pictures of his adult life with his wife and children. I've found more information on his wife than on him. Earliest record I found of him was when he was 8 and living with this family in a different state. The census record says he was their nephew, but there were other boarders in that residence during that time too. then after that, the next record I found i the timeline was when he enlisted in the airforce when he was a young adult. it says he mother signed the forms... but its lists the woman who signed the forms his mother as "Ella." Well, his wife's name is "Ellois" (also called Ella for short), and he was living with her family at the time he enlisted. (maybe its a coincidence that they had similar names... or maybe he had his wife sign the forms) My mom knows nothing of my grandfather's family, and she did ask my grandfather when he was alive, and she said all he told her was "we have nothing to do with those people." Your post actually inspired me to go back to my digging today. I might have found the living relative of the person who my great grandfather lived with when he was 8. I reached out to her to ask if she knew of my great grandpa or if her grandfather ever talked about the 2 little boys (great grandpa and his brother) who lived with them during that time. Fingers crossed she responds!
My name is wrong all over Ancestry.com because the first person to add me to a tree read a "D" as an "O" on a birth registry. My brother, dad, grandfather and great grandfather all have/had the same or similar first names with different middle names. They're just initials with no name in two cases. Someone assumed Jr., III, IV, so their middle names are wrong all over as well. You can't contact these people about their trees, so its apparently just wrong everywhere forever. People use these trees as if they're official documents. I have to wonder how many thousands of places on Ancestry are totally wrong.
I agree. I found several times the people there were wrong, on things I could verify. I even twice contacted people to follow up with clues as to my great-grandfather, and they (separate people who didn't know each other and had different conclusions) who assured me I was on the wrong track, and they could "prove" it. But I think the direct and circumstantial verifiable supports my conclusion.
Well, I did it. After getting the initial concept over two years ago and going through bad draft after bad draft, I finally finished the first chapter of my Skyrim fanfiction and I actually feel happy with how it turned. At 21 pages and a little over 8000 words, it's taken a good few weeks of revising until I finally had something I was satisfied with today. I know it's just fanfiction, but this has been something that I've wanted do for a while now and it finally feels like I'm making progress with it.