Hobbits8

I don't usually post much about the family because some of them don't like finding out that people they don't know seem to know all about them when meeting them in other environments. Last Thursday-Sunday, the girls and I went up to Indiana to visit Ben and one family we've known through the internet for many years and to do some genealogy research. It all was quite fun.

I was very successful in my genealogy quest and found a probate packet that had its earliest receipt contained therein from 1835. A probate packet contains all the papers that were collected during the administration of someone's estate when he dies. So people will submit bills owed by that person that need to be paid. There can be bills for expenses related to the illness just before death or burial expenses themselves. There can be outstanding bills from the store which will say "shoes for James", etc.. Then there's an inventory of all the property owned by the person (even if the wife is still alive!). The property is sold and a listing of the sale price and who bought what appears. Then the expenses are totaled and the assets are totaled and the remainder divided among the heirs which are all usually named. This can be an incredible goldmine of genealogical information besides the common everyday stuff one learns about the ancestor. (I debated about putting "ancestor" in quotation marks because I mentally went in the Bertie Wooster way of referring to his Aunt Agatha.) One reason the naming of the heirs is particularly valuable is because names of wives will be given with their married names. Often it can be difficult to track female lines because of the name change upon marriage.

Probate records may be the ONLY proof of the parentage of a woman. Then if the son or daughter of the deceased has died, grandchildren will be named. Back then this happened a LOT. Well, anyway on to other family news (this was "family" news by the way--just not very recent "news") One reason we went to Ben's in Indiana now is that he has started working for Caterpillar as an engineer after getting his master's degree from Purdue. He's now living in Illinois, but he's making weekend trips back to Lafayette to fix up his house to get it ready to sell. We planned to be there on the weekend so that he would be there and we could visit the internet family while it was convenient to kill many birds with one stone. The exciting news about Ben though is that he is going to be doing two rotations at places other than his "home" location and just found out that he will be based in Switzerland for three months while he gets to travel around Europe in the course of his job! How exciting is that???

Sam has been working on all the arrangements he needs to make in order to work for Berlitz at a foreign language camp in either Germany or Switzerland this summer. Unfortunately it's very hard to coordinate everything, so things are still up in the air. He is going and has already bought his plane ticket, and has been offered a job as a counselor a camp over several weeks. But unless he gets the work visa, he won't be able to work. It's all in process, so we hope for a favorable result. Jed is home after his first year at LeTourneau U. Abbie is doing beautiful things with her drawing and piano. Grace is doing more physical stuff in working with her (now) three horses. We're all looking forward to the end of the school year, and I hope I don't fizzle out before then.