Hobbits8

Happy 20th birthday to Jed!

Amy's done it again:

Happy birthday to Sam who is 22 years old today.

This is a very funny article relating the foolishness of Facebook.  I joined facebook because I wanted to keep up with what my kids were doing. I don't do any of the gift giving (such as it is ... meaningless) and snowball throwing.  I do enjoy the occasional thoughtful flair item.

The quizzes are inane. Last night I took one (and I rarely take the quizzes) to find the place I would most like to live.  It came up with Italy, which would be fun, but I did wonder that so many of my personal preferences were not considered.  Even though I wanted a historical spot, I would have preferred an American historical spot.  Right now, I'd love to live in some small New England town with four seasons and within an easy drive to Boston. Of course, Pennsylvania is pretty nice, too, and it's got that great old historical city of Philadelphia, which I found very friendly when I was there in September.  Did you know that Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was considered for  a possible location for the nation's capital? I read that in either Decision in Philadelphia or Founding Brothers.

I think particularly for those who have strongly resisted the urges of Facebook (Eva and Cherie, I'm thinking of you!), you will find much of your own views expressed in the article.  I laughed my head off -- particularly the part about one friend choice of the author's wife.

I'm going to do a Mary Sellers here, and ask if you had a choice of anywhere in the world you wanted to live, where would it be?  And why?

When I was reading the choices, I did have in mind the results of one friend who got Ireland, but I knew she'd picked "nature" and "sitting around drinking in pubs" type responses -- everyone would laugh at me for picking those types of responses. But I'd still like to live in Ireland!

The hat tip for this article goes to Kasey from Gutenberg, but I'm pretty sure she doesn't read my blog.

We're off from school this week.  The beginning of the week was spent in doing taxes and filing a FAFSA for Jed for next year. I also had to reformat my desktop computer because a Windows update caused it to crash.  It really needed a major purging though, so it worked out well getting all the files off as I make my way towards getting them organized. But as with all computer fixes, one thing led to another and another ...  I found out that my Mac laptop will not write to a external hard drive which has the NTFS format (which is common for Windows and particularly for larger hard drives).  So I had to investigate, and I did have a successful resolution.  Then I tried to fix my VMFusion on my Mac. It's a program which will allow you to run Windows programs.  I had some headaches with that when I upgraded versions in October or so and only just now got back to trying to resolve that.  So now, after spending most of yesterday on it, that is solved.   But then the printer that was hooked up to my pc wouldn't print. That took some searching to figure out what its problem was.

Now I just need to get some organizing of my back up external drives, but that will have to wait.  Because I am finally getting back to work on Sam's quilt. See the evidence below. I got the top together and then had a problem because I didn't have enough fabric for the back.  As soon as I'm done with this post, I'm going to start basting the quilt layers together and am hoping to be stitching it up tomorrow.  I do have to make an excursion to the Family History Library Center this afternoon since they called yesterday to tell me that my microfilm has come in.  Will I find the marriage record of Chloe Foster and Andrew Cately?  Will I find Chloe's birth record?   New England records are organized by towns, so she very easily might not have been born in the same town in which she was married.

Things have been busy the last few weeks. I attended a genealogy institute in Salt Lake City and also tacked some extra days on to be able to research at the Family History Library which houses about a kazillion rolls of microfilm.  It was good to see again people I'd met at the conferences and the institute at Samford University last June and even one very helpful woman I know from my research in a Pennsylvania County when we were traveling to visit colleges a few years ago.  Meeting new people was a highlight of the trip, too.  One of my new-found friends only a year ago became a certified genealogist and she is 70 years old!  She was a marvel and someone I could not go far wrong by emulating.   Some of us who know each other through an email list got together one night for dinner enabling us to put faces to names.

Being able to research in microfilmed records from such far-flung areas was wonderful. As much as I love going to courthouses, it was really nice to be able to get information I otherwise would have had to wait for.

My biggest find was discovering the parents of Electa Van Hoesen. She was married before 1850 which is the year the census began naming every member of a household. Before that, most family members were mere tally marks in age categories, therefore it's not directly helpful in determining parent-child relationships.  Electa was b. in 1823 and lived the first half of her life in Cortland County, New York. She died in 1889 in Rock County, Minnesota. I actually did not know that she had died there, but her husband Robert was listed as a widower in the 1895 Iowa state census. They were living in Rock County in 1880, but I didn't have much information after that until recently when I obtained their homestead file.  New York does not have marriage records for the time period when Electa and Robert got married, and so the information has to be gained from some other source. For me that source, was Electa's death record in Minnesota.  Her parents and her age in years, months, and days are listed.  I connected with some people who are descended from brothers of Electa and found out from one of them the location and date of her parents' marriage. I do need to verify the information, but according to this their family lived in northwest Massachusetts and they were there at the time of Shay's Rebellion.  Reading a town history, I discovered that Electa's grandfather was in the Revolutionary War and likely fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill.  His widow applied for a widow's pension which is available on Footnote.com.  Lots of great stuff in pension files.  Reading in a family history, I learned that the family (all information subject to verification) had come from England in the 1630s and settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

I've also been working on a new Web site just for genealogy and history.  I got it set up here:  Quotidian Genealogy. My daughter-in-law Amy made the header.  Isn't it beautiful?!

Our new printer arrived today after sitting on a FedEx delivery truck for 11 days. We did have a couple of days of bad roads due to weather issues, but other days were recorded with "Customer not available or business closed," which, was not true at all. Someone was always home.   I had called three times in attempts to get the problem resolved, but as soon as I emailed the vendor about my problem, I got a phone call from them, and he was firm and assertive with the local FedEx office which resulted in a delivery today.  I don't know about the company Entercomputers in general, but if how quickly they shipped my item and how they handled FedEx is any indication, they seem like a great company.  Now they just need to switch shippers to use UPS.  I've never had a problem with UPS.

We'd had our old black and white laser printer for something like 12 years.  It is also a copy machine which is a wonderful thing for a homeschool family to have.  But it had its problems and since the problems were compounding, it seemed that buying a new machine was a better option. I checked out recomendations and models with Oddparts to make sure I was getting one which could be refilled. They don't sell printers, but they do sell toner and ink -- I recommend them.