Honestly, I have so very much to learn and feel that every day, no make that every hour, there's even more than there was yesterday. Is it just me or is this whole area of interest growing at an explosive rate? And did I hear that the number two searched term now is "genealogy" or some variation. Go ahead and guess what the number one search term is...? Porn.
I have finished up my research for Samuel Albert House and you can see my long post here and the last post here. When I finished that last one I had a really nice feeling that I'd done a pretty good job of it and executed what for me, where I now am, might be called a Junior Grade Reasonably Exhaustive Search.
I celebrated by reorganizing all of his research and making sure the printed materials and the digital materials were soundly put together so that I could easily find anything with out too much digging. Then as one should, wrote it all up as a report, printed it out, and did an edit. I'll let it sit for a bit and then go back over making sure it's sourced (good girl) and viewing it in such a way that anyone picking it up would know what I'm talking about. Also shared SA House's death certificate with Cousin William because he's a good researcher and has shared with me and didn't have it. Because it cost me $25 to get from the Maryland State Archives, this sharing will save him time and money and who doesn't like that?
Once that was done and SA House was put to bed, so to speak, I just went ahead and gave the whole area a spruce up over here under the Nut Tree. This time around I felt like the materials on the shelf had some better organization than they ever had before. I know that as this work goes along it gets harder to drop everything and organize it all. (I've seen Mom's space and she's been doing this since 1970s so you can imagine what she has to deal with if she wants to "organize".) I felt great when everything was properly labeled and sitting in its place on shelves.
Last, it's time to start on Samuel Albert House's natural father Isaac Biggerstaff. The first step was to gather all of the materials I had on him, read them through and put them in proper order. Called Mom and we chatted about what's already known on him. Mom has a book about the Davis and Biggerstaff families that she mailed to me last week and I'm reading it now. Also have reread Allegany Passage, which is the story of the Church of the Brethren community, or Dunkards, in Maryland and their migration to what's now West Virginia. The Biggerstaff family is mentioned there. I figure that I need to be familiar with what's at hand before I can move forward and find the missing. We're back in the frontier of the 1700s "over the mountain" so it will be rough going. It's all land records, wills and probate, and tax reports. I do find it fascinating!
For the first time I gathered all of my tools and helpful hint sheets and put them together in the FAN Principle folder, which I live by lately and will help with the Dunkards who stuck together. That felt really good. Made certain that all my tools for the states of West Virginia and before that Virginia were at the top of the stack. Are these called finding aides or is that something else, I don't know? Now my goodie pack is together and I'll no longer have to hunt for each item. You would have thought I'd have figured out to do that before this!
And then there's the DNA results which were the sum of yesterday's posting! Whoop! I got totally immersed in that for two days and counting. I can not believe that the 23andMe test and massive results were only $99. Whatta deal! Randy Seaver of the wonderful Genea-Musings blog just posted more of his 23andMe results yesterday and his writing helped me think deeper into what I was looking at. I really couldn't believe it but at 99.9% European I'm more Caucasian than Randy who was wondering if he's the whitest guy in the world in his first post! How can that be possible with all his New England ancestors?! But I'm a tad jealous because he has Native American DNA, or that's the presumption. Oh well, I'm very happy with my .1% Sub Saharan African DNA. Wonder where that came from and if it's just a tiny vestige of a long ago migration. Fascinating!!
Photo of the Day from the Archive:
A lovely old post card of
Cumberland, Allegany, Maryland, 1906.
The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/03/wisdom-wednesday-moving-right-along.html
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