Aug 25, 2023 —Walking, Planning, and Researching
Where does an entire week go when you aren’t looking?
No, really. Where does it go?
I feel like I haven’t got a lot to share this week, but that seems to be par for the course lately. And the time really did get used. I didn’t fritter it away. So here’s the story…
First, I continued to exercise. Long walks — one hitting almost eleven kilometres (about six and a half miles) — on our local trails are a way to use a couple hours a day, six days a week. Thus far I am taking one day off each week to rest and recoup, but other than that I keep at it.
While on my walks I try to take photos. Our local trails don’t offer many scenic views — it’s mostly trees — but I do my best. I encountered whatever this is while on the previously mentioned long walk:
It appears to be a lid to something, stuck to the top of a rotting tree. I have no idea, but it’s been there a very long time.
And here’s a cannibal tree:
That happens quite a bit. I photographed a number of similar situations — trees growing on top of fallen trees — but this was the best one. I don’t think I want to be in those woods during a serious windstorm.
And finally, Anne spotted this bright yellow fungus on our walk today:
It’s probably ten feet up in a rotten tree trunk. Gotta keep your eyes open.
I spent more time planning, ordering, and acquiring the stuff to redo our upper deck and the step by the back door. I mentioned this last week.
That’s TimberTech Azek decking, some concrete, and a few treated 2x4s. Don’t ask what this cost. It’s crazy. But at least it has a Class A fire rating.
A friend (and reader) suggested I look into aluminum decking as an alternative. I did so, and found multiple Canadian manufacturers of such things, but they didn’t seem right for our specific situation. The systems I could find interlock to create a water tight deck, and I couldn’t see how to cut them or work with them in our oddball shape. In the end, it seemed to be more of a problem than TimberTech. It might actually have been slightly cheaper, but that doesn’t matter if you can’t figure out how to make it work.
Sadly, it will be a while before I can get started on these projects. Fridays are always insanely busy, and this weekend we’re being social butterflies just as Covid comes back. We’re going to visit some friends on Saturday and different friends will be visiting us on Sunday. I hope to get started on the back step on Monday, but we’ll have to see how things go.
On a related note, Anne and I cannot figure out what to call the step I am building, and we need help. A “stoop” seems to be several steps leading up to the door of a house. That’s not what we have. And it’s not a landing, since that’s a transition between two staircases. I’ve been calling it a step but it’s a big one: about seven feet wide and 2.5 feet deep. Given it is much larger than a typical step on a staircase, the term “step” doesn’t quite feel right either. So what is one large “step” up to a door called? Is there a technical or architectural term for this thing? Thoughts?
If you’re confused, I will provide photos when I get to work on this thing.
And finally, my genealogy research continues. Here’s an overview shot of the family tree so far:
No, I don’t expect you to be able to read that.
At the bottom is me, my wife, and my brother. Moving up one row you get to my parents. Then my grandparents. (One of my grandmothers remarried, which is why the group of three people, not just two.) And so on up the tree. The green rectangles are places where Ancestry thinks it knows who the parents of someone are, but I have not yet reviewed or approved them. The grey rectangles show needed parents where Ancestry has no suggestions yet.
As you can tell, my efforts so far have mostly focused on one side of the tree: the side researched by my maternal grandmother. I am nowhere near getting through all of her documentation. This is a long term project, but to already be back seven — and possibly eight — generations in such a short time isn’t bad.
At the top of the tree are people born in the early 1700s. Some in the USA, others in Sweden, Germany, and probably other places.
Not visible in the tree are all the people not directly related to me. Sooooooo many people. Some of these folks had a lot of kids. I had to hide them to display things reasonably. There are currently 168 entries. In addition there are errors in my tree. With this kind of research you find conflicting things, and wind up inserting people into the wrong places, or multiple times. My plan is to gradually clean things up and reduce the number of errors.
Of course you never get rid of all the errors. That’s impossible. The various historical documents contain mistakes, and the people who could answer questions are long gone. But I can get closer to the truth than what I know so far, and that is the goal.
Some people have said they’re interested in the stories I find as I do this. Here are a few of those.
Darius Stacy
(Or Stacey… the extra ‘e’ comes and goes in all of the various people using that name.) I’ve mentioned him before. He fought for the Union in the US Civil War, volunteering with the Iowa Infantry. His regiment was basically wiped out at the Battle of Marks Mills in Arkansas. He was captured, force marched to a POW camp in Tyler, Texas, where he died later of a bladder infection. (And yes, I have confirmed the bladder infection with a contemporary document.)
Darius was 35 when he died.
My grandmother says Darius had a brother named David who fought for the Confederacy, and even says she had two tintype photos in a frame, one of each brother. My mom saw those photos, but they have gone missing. The problem is that so far I cannot find a David Stacey in that generation at all. I’ve found Darius’s father, grandfather, and their children, but the only David Stacy is the son of Darius himself. It seems unlikely he would have fought for the Confederacy given he was born in 1850 and would only have been 15 when the war ended.
Jan Jansson Lindgren and Maria Olofsdotter
These are my great great great grandfather and mother. They lived in Sweden in the early 1800s. Their son, Anders, emigrated to the USA. He’s one less great back in the tree.
Jan and Maria had seven children, and the survival rate was not good. Their first child — Anna Maria — died after 17 days. Anders was the second child and lived from 1842–1923. Johan, their third, died when he was 15. The forth, Anna Maja, seems to have gone missing. My grandmother found her birth recorded in 1847, but not her death. The next three children (Carolina, Olof, and Carl) were apparently doing fine, at ages 6, 4, and 1 respectively. Sadly, scarlet fever killed them all in just two weeks in February 1857.
Their mother had it worse than that, because Jan died in 1856, just ten months before that awful February. It seems Maria never remarried, but she did have two more children: another Carolina (last name unknown so far) and Johanna Larsdotter. Maria lived until 1890, and my grandmother has notes saying Maria and the second Carolina immigrated to America, but I have not tried to chase the details down yet. As I say, I am still in the process of entering my grandmother’s collected research into the Ancestry database.
Julius Lincoln
Julius was one of the eight children of Anders Lindgren (who changed his name to Andrew Lincoln once in the USA) and Anna Christina Jonsdotter. (If there was any doubt about the Swedish heritage in this part of the family, I trust you are convinced by the names.)
Julius was a Lutheran minister, and he was also a member of the first graduating class of Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. He lived in Lindsborg, Jamestown New York, Los Angeles California and Chicago Illinois. He was a decorated Knight of the Royal Order of Vasa (Sweden). He was also a member of a special commission of the US Federal Food Administration which studied food conditions in allied countries in WWI. I found his passport application, submitted just two days before he was supposed to take a ship to Europe in 1917.
Julius married Gertrude Dunn and they had no children. My mother tells me he was known to be stern and not good with kids. Apparently his family didn’t approve of Gertrude. They were farmers from Lindsborg Kansas and she was a city woman who wore lipstick. The horror!
Clara Stacy
Clara was one of my great great grandmothers. She’s been an interesting research project, and the work is not done. A typical problem is her birthday. Multiple sources state it is Nov 24, 1861, but her death certificate says she was born on Dec 11, 1860. I don’t yet know how to resolve that.
Clara married John McCreary in 1877. They had four children (John, Mary, Charles, and Thomas). Her husband John died in February of 1885, according the the Find a Grave index.
Then she married Patric Carr, but the wedding date was Jan 3, 1885. How did she marry Patric a month before her previous husband died? I have no clue. All the records appear to check out, so something must be off by a year or two but I don’t know what.
In any event, Clara and Patric had eight children (Dolly, Harry, Michael, Mary, Leo, Leroy, Eddie, and Mabel — the last two were twins). Dolly was my great grandmother.
Patric died in 1901 and Clara did not remarry. Perhaps that’s because she wound up in a state hospital for over 35 years. She shows up in the Mt. Pleasant State Hospital in Iowa in the 1910 census. Various additional census documents show her there until her death in 1943. The (somewhat paraphrased) death certificate says: Dementia Precox for 35 years. Senility for several years. Fractured femur due to accidental fall 4 days before death. Senility is given as the cause of death.
Doing the math, it seems she was committed for dementia precox — now called schizophrenia — in about 1908.
I’ll come back to Clara eventually to see if I can figure out the date conflict around John McCreary’s death and her marriage to Patric Carr, as well as her actual birthday. These are the kinds of things you trip over with records as messy as these. Census data, birth, marriage and death certificates, various church records, draft cards, newspaper articles and data from cemeteries can all be in error. Add in the number of people with similar names, or who changed their names, and things get crazy. And that’s not even considering people who honestly misremembered or actually lied.
I cannot say all of these stories came from Ancestry. In fact most come from my grandmother and the research she did, or my mom. The exception is discovering that Clara was committed. That came from Ancestry and finding the census records.
In any case, without a prompt to put all of this together into one place and start sorting through it, I would never have learned these things. And Ancestry is definitely adding to the tapestry. My grandmother’s research is great, but I’m casting a much wider net in the family tree I am building.
Next week I might have new stories, or not, but I will definitely have spent more time digging into the research my grandmother did, and the family tree will have a bit more data in it.
There you have it. I hope to have the back step/stoop/whatever built next week. Beyond that, who knows. Cheers!