News stories about politicians being denied communion, high school coaches praying on the football field, and taxpayers being forced to support religious education remind me of why my ancestors came to this great country of ours. To be blunt, it was to get away from s*** like that. My father loved to tell the story of how his DeBacker ancestors came over from Belgium after … Continue reading The Belgian School War
Sunday, July 3rd, will mark the 158th anniversary of the fall of Marietta, Georgia, to Union Forces under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman. The importance of Marietta and nearby Kennesaw Mountain was that they were the key to control of the Chattahoochee River and to the vital railway leading into Atlanta from the Shenandoah Valley. Thus allowing the union forces to lay siege … Continue reading What Miss Mattie Said to the General
A simple reason so many of my posts relate to my mother’s side of the family is that many of her ancestors came over during colonial times. All arrived before the Civil War. On my father’s side of the family, the DeBackers did not come over from Belgium until 1883. So it pleases me to say that, for once, I have found something regarding my … Continue reading The Accidental Doctor
I have access through my local library to newspaperarchives.com, and I went there last night to see if I could find further information regarding the court case that I wrote about in the previous post. I found a single paragraph in the November 23, 1872, edition of the Savannah Morning News describing the results of the lawsuit in which my great-great-grandfather accused a man of … Continue reading More Questions Than Answers
I found a court case involving my great-great-grandfather, George C Spiegel. This occurred in mid-1872, before the family left Savannah for Dallas. In that year, George was a cigar maker living in Savannah Georgia. The events described in these court documents from the Savannah, Chatham County, Georgia Court, took place a few months before my great-grandmother was born. I discovered these items in an ancestry.com … Continue reading How Does One Lose 15,600 Cigars?
There were two family history discoveries today; one by me and one made by my cousin. First of all, I finally found my father in the 1950 census. Back in April, the US government made public the individual listings of the US census taken in 1950. Within weeks after the release, I had found all of my ancestors who were living in that year. I … Continue reading Two Discoveries in One Day
As I mentioned in an earlier post from about six months ago, I have been working on a complete rewrite of Gathering Leaves (and not just another edition.) My goal is to eliminate repetition, remove superfluous minutia, and strip out all the endnotes (I admit I was in competition with Edward Gibbon for most endnotes ever.) In addition to there being deletions, there are also … Continue reading On Down the Tallapoosa to the Gulf of Mexico
Here is something interesting that I found regarding a third great-grandfather on my mother’s side. His name was Evan Prothro (1788-1864), a.k.a. Evan the Planter, grandson of Evan the Patriot, and father of my great-great-grandmother, Martha Josephine Prothro. He was a plantation owner and slaveholder who lived in the upcountry in South Carolina near Aiken and across from Augusta on the Georgia side of the … Continue reading Three Valuable Sawmills for Sale
Not too long before my mother passed away, she wrote her memoirs on three-hole punch college ruled paper along with photographs and assembled the contents in a 2-inch three-ring binder which she then passed on to me. I have decided to transcribe and present her memoirs here thus allowing her to have her voice heard. The First 50 Years of My Life1928 to 1978Dorothy Patricia … Continue reading My Mother’s Memoir – Part Three
I have found my mother in the U.S. Census for 1950. This time I used the “official” website for the 1950 census (https://1950census.archives.gov/), where they have used “machine learning (AI)” to extract names from the enumeration sheets to build a searchable index. Here, I searched for “Patricia Dobbs” in Washington DC, and I got a few hits for Dobbs or Hobbs, one of which was … Continue reading That Was Too Easy!
Gathering Leaves 