Genealogy - Diggin up Dirt

It has been over a month since I have made an entry in the blog. Life has been busy; my family tree grew a very large branch when I married my best friend of 10 years. Preparing for the wedding took up loads of time and to top things off a tree fell on our house just 2 weeks after the ceremony.

 

I have been packing up and saving items from the wedding, keepsakes to pass down as things have been passed to me. I hope that the wedding bouquet jewelry that was in my bouquet will be used by our granddaughter for her wedding. It would be a nice tradition.  

 

 

 

One of the things that I have inherited is a box of flowers that came from my great grandmother’s wedding June 15, 1899, when Josephine S. Davis married George Arthur West. Josephine’s brother, William “Will” Davis had kept the small box of flowers and passed them on to my grandfather, Chester Davis West in the 1960s.

 

 

 

We have some of our flowers drying that I will place in a box and save. I wonder if they will last 110 years like the ones I hold in my hand now.

It has been close to 3 years that I have been writing in this blog. The hits have grown over 50,000 and it has helped me in many ways sharpen focus on various trouble spot, clarify my thought patterns on particular people, get a better grasp on the historical events that lead to family changes and connected me with many individuals both related and not related. I had been thinking about preserve the information by printing it off on 3 ring notebook paper and placing it in a binder. With all of this data sitting on someone else’s server anything could happen to it and I would be out all of the work.

 

I had purchased a ream of paper and finally decided to print off each entry. I had an empty 2 inch binder sitting around and used it to hold the copies, a half reams worth. I flipped through them, reviewing the stories, remembering the paths taken to get to the story themselves. Picking out my favorite was easy, the series I wrote on Dead Ancestors Soap Opera  and related article, What Happened to Lizzie?. The  most fascinating and mildly disturbing stories were those covering my great-great grandfather Burgess’ behavior and wives. His decisions/behavior affected his wives, their children and his children. The public profile of him as the heroic Civil War veteran seemed to fly in the face of his personal behavior. I started out not knowing much more than the man had, in his lifetime, three wives. The middle wife never seemed to have more than a nickname; the third wife’s last name was questionable.

 

Once the Civil War Pension benefits record copies started showing up, everything became crystal clear. One wife dead, one insane, his own children scattered, two step children missing and a new wife with a questionable past all put question to what the paper would refer to as a distinguished soldier. The story started to unfold as I dug through more than 400 pages of testimony. The connections started falling into place; I now knew full names and had a better idea of dates.

 

The story keeps coming around. I found George’s second wives son and his descendants and was glad to see that things seemed to have worked out for him in the long run. Recently I was contacted by someone related to the Harbottles. George’s third wife, Edith Catherine had an affair with a Harbottle that resulted in a child being born. I had looked for Gertrude to see what had become of her after being left in New York State once her mother took up with my great-great grandfather. I never did find her, but did learn a lot about the Harbottle clan in the process.

 

One of these days I will revisit the files to see if there are any more missing clues. I am sure in the 400+ pages of documentation that there is yet another nugget of gold to be found.

 

 

It seemed like a small bit of information without a lot of merit. The Bradford Era had an entry that gave a tidbit of information concerning my great-great grandfather William C Davis.

 

Bradford Era, Bradford, Pennsylvania, March 27, 2009

“Another Era

 

100 Years Ago

The First Baptist church is negotiating for the purchase of the old building just north of the church on Congress Street, now occupied by W. C. Davis as a meat market, which will be razed this summer.”

 

I went to Google maps and started digging for the location of the First Baptist in Bradford. I found it at 71 Congress Street. This didn’t seem to make sense for a location as the addresses that I had previously found for my great-great grandfather’s meat market had been in the 20s on Congress, much closer to Main Street.

 

I opened my account with Newspaperarchive.com and searched for articles on the First Baptist Church in Bradford Pennsylvania. I knew I needed information around the late 1880s to early 1900. I found an ad for the times of services at the First Baptist Church located on Congress and Corydon streets.

 

The Daily Era, Bradford, Pennsylvania, July 3, 1886

 

“FIRST BAPTIST Church — Corner Congress and Corydon streets. Rev. James P. Thorns, pastor. Services at 11 a, m. and 7 p. m. Sunday School at 12:30 p. m. Young people's meeting at  8:30 p. m. Evening subject: "The Perils and Hopes of Working Classes.''

 

I knew now that my original information on the store location was correct; the next problem was locating on which corner. I was guessing that it would be the northwest side of Congress, but I couldn’t be sure.

 

I grabbed the history book that I had on Bradford written by Sally Ryan Costik from the Bradford Landmark Society, Images of America, Around Bradford Volume II and started flipping through the pages. Chapter Five, page 83 held all the information I would need.

 

The top photo showed the church in 1923, Corydon Street appeared on the south side of the building and I couldn’t tell what was on the north side from this photo. The description told me that the church was built in 1880 and dedicated in 1881. It also confirmed that the building was torn down in 1941 when the new church at its present day location was built.

 

The photo on the bottom of the page, taken from directly in front of the building, showed an empty lot that was filled with children and a large tent covered area marked for Bradford Vacation School in 1923 on the north side of the building.

 

I grabbed the photo of my great-great grandfather’s meat market off the wall and closely examined the porch posts, brickwork, windows and trim on the building next door. Records that I had found let me know that the W. C. Davis meat market was in business from 1887 to 1893. This article would let me know that he still had the business location as late as 1909.

 

There was a match to the porch posts, brickwork, brickwork and trim on the photos of the church in the Bradford book. I had wondered what the building that peaked out from the left corner of the photo had been.

 

The church was designed with three front doors. The middle one seemed to go into the church, the other 2 doors, located on either side of the main church door and had entries off of porches. The window on the right had side of the church had a business name in it, Northern Oil. This bit of information is still a bit curious. Did the church rent out space as a money making venture?

 

I also found out that there was a hotel located behind the church on Corydon street called the Hotel Florence.

 

The Daily Era, Bradford, Pennsylvania, August 18, 1887

 

“Mrs. A. Simon Painfully Hurt.

 

Mrs. A. Simon, wife of our respected townsman, fell on the sidewalk on Corydon street between the Hotel Florence and the Baptist church on Tuesday night. Her left leg was fractured and she sustained other serums internal injuries. Last night Mrs. Simon was progressing favorably. A suit against the city will result.”

 

The buildings are long gone. The corner where the church once stood has a gas station and has had for as long as I can remember. The building that was behind the church is now the “Friendship Table.” It had been several things over the years including the telephone company office.

Once I got really involved in doing ancestry I bought Family Tree Maker and downloaded my gedcom off of ancestry to build on my desktop. At the time building on line could be an exercise in patience. Everything was entered by hand, switching from one view to another after having waited what seems like forever for it to load.

 

Working off my desktop program increased the speed of the entry along considerably and gave me greater flexibility in editing, comparing and publishing. Seeing as it seems like forever ago and so much has changed I decided to once again try Ancestry’s on line tree builder. I have been working on the ancestry of a friend of mine, who it turns out is related to Daniel Boone. Needless to say he was thrilled at this.

 

Attaching records has become a point and click process. Ancestry does the searching for you, although you can force it to search further and select from the posted results. As easy as this has become you have to watch what you are doing or you can end up attaching people willy-nilly and really mess things up. (Spoken from experience)

 

One of the problems with it so far is that when giving you the ability to add into your tree family information on a comparison screen it doesn’t show all of what you already have added. I found that I have added in children and spouses more than once because it didn’t match exactly what I had.  I also haven’t found a way to download the gedcom to my desktop and then reload it back to the website without creating another tree entry. This also causes a problem with the support documents, it breaks the links.

 

There still isn't the ability, like the desktop version to create books of family information, aside from the fancy book you can bind. It seems to be good way to progress quickly making basic family connections and sharing with family friends for input. They can add information but can only search the available free data sources.

 

Happy Easter to all of my readers. That is me in the photo from 1963, front row, swinging my umbrella style purse that I remember vividly. It would hold my gloves, hankie and possibly a penny or two. The hat was a necessity for church in those days. Mom probably made the coat I had on. My brother, in the fancy hat, is beside me. I am sure mom didn't get away with the hat business many more years after this and for sure he doesn't wear this style any longer. The rest of the girls are my West cousins.

 

Now that I live in the south it is no longer necessary to have your Easter outfit made from a light colored wool. My southern friends get a kick out of that, they can't imagine putting on wool past February, if they own any wool at all. Although the sun was shinning in this picture and there isn't any snow visible, it was probably cold.