Thursday, August 7, 2008

About Town


I really love this little town. The people are so friendly. We went to Spring Fest and saw a very small street fair. It had the usual craft items for sale, food tents, old cars, covered wagon rides, and camel rides. Me on the hump of a camel, I don't think so. My favorite was the Ford Skyliner Hardtop convertible. The owner even encouraged us to sit in it and take pictures. It was very cool. That I would have loved to ride in.

A couple days ago as DH and I pulled into the parking lot at Walmart, I looked up and said "What is that?" DH knew right away. It was a 1965 Ford International Harvester Scout. Are you as amazed as I am that he knew what it was? It was the cutest thing. It was a nice bright fire engine red. The lady who owned says she drives it around town, and she and her hubby have taken many years to restore it. She wanted that particular model since it was made the year she was born and cost new $3500 in 1965. She's had a bed liner installed and the seats are from a Ford Mustang.

I know how people are about their cars, especially classic vehicles. and she noticed the door was ajar on the passenger side. Says it happens all the time since people are so curious about the vehicle. Said it was no big deal. OK, I am from the Detroit area and you know what I am thinking. We had a nice chat with her as she pointed out the different gear shifts - 3 of them, one for hauling farm equipment, one for four-wheel drive and the third the usual gear shift.
It's a great town and the residents are very patient with all the northerners who have invaded their town.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

A Message From a Zombie

All right already with the menopause. I thought I was over those disgusting symptoms/side effects of menopause. Last few nights I discovered I was not.

Here is discussion between DH & TennLady over the last week.

TL: Why are you wearing a sweatshirt?
DH: It's cold in here.
TL: Honey, it's 95 degrees outside and 77 in here. It's not cold.
DH: Yes it is. Can we turn the thermostat up a degree or so?
TL: No, put another sweatshirt on.

Many years ago when I was great with second child, during one of the hottest springs and summers that I could remember, with no air conditioning, I swore I would never be without it again. Of course, it didn't help that I had gained 60 lbs and people frequently asked how many babies I was carrying in there. It was awful. Oh and I was chasing a two year old around that summer too! After the birth of second child, it was if the weight and heat of the world had lifted.

So here I am 26 years later having already experienced menopause, when it strikes again. Hot flashes, sleepless nights. So now I ask:

Why can't hot flashes occur when its cold out?

Monday, August 4, 2008

Why the Filing Doesn't Get Done!

As I have stated before I am a family historian/researcher/idiot-savant!

No really, I can get so focused on genealogy, I forget to do lots of things - housework, cooking, etc.

After the Big Move last October, much of that got put on hold. After all it is pretty hard to check on something when your family history is packed up in boxes in the garage in no particular order.

When we moved into the space-challenged condo last fall, I brought four boxes of so-called "current" files. Those were the items I had worked on last and I had hopes of going through all this stuff and entering the info into my genealogy program, filing, disposing or researching further. The only rub was that I no longer had my big legal size file cabinet, so all my files sat in boxes in the one car garage. I still had the smaller letter size cabinet, but that wasn't going to work. When we moved, the movers said "You don't need to take the files out of that cabinet, we can move it like it is." A few months later, I realized they were wrong. While searching for info on a family member, I realized while I could certainly open that drawer, I sure as heck couldn't close it again. So there it sat until shortly before our second move, when the DH said we will either fix it or pitch it.

If you knew my DH like I do, you would realize he isn't the most mechanical hubby around. This was of course hampered by us both having really handy dads. If something mechanical needed repair, just call a dad. It was nice.

Well, my dad is gone now and his dad is beyond doing repairs like that anymore, so DH took it on and .. he fixed it!

Now, a couple months have passed and we realized that I still needed to replace the original legal cabinet because not everything would fit and I am not throwing all that hard work out!

Cabinet has since been replaced and files shifted and three of those four boxes sorted, filed or dispensed with. I knew this last box would be hard. This is the box that I dumped all the unproven connections.

I came up with a strategy for filing these items so that they weren't lost in the files and so that I could easily put my hands on them when I was ready to work on them. So far that has worked well until last night.

There are certain names that intrigue you. Names that when you see them, you know there is a connection somewhere. One name that gets under my researcher skin is Jabez Percival. I now have five of them in my database. I'm almost ashamed to tell you that this one group of papers sat in a file folder for 12 years before I realized how he connected to my family. And his last residence was in Michigan. And the information was sent to me by someone not related to this person at all.

The point is that last night when I pulled this stack of papers out of the box for filing and saw again the name "Jabez Chapman Percival" that little light bulb in my head went on. One Jabez Percival is my great-great-great-great grandfather; one is my great-great-grandfather's brother; one is this "uncle's" grandson. So instead of putting him in that "Incomplete Percival File" pulled all the census I could on this family, went to the new Family Search Labs site which has some Michigan Birth-Marriage-Death records online and proved him back to a common ancestor. Sometimes it is a good thing when brothers give their sons the same names and the names are then carried down. Mostly it makes for confusing genealogy.

For now, second cousin five times removed Jabez C. Percival sits in the "incomplete" file awaiting scanning of the newspaper photograph and the accompanying articles.

Six more inches of "discoveries" awaits.