Category: Family

Spiegel

How Does One Lose 15,600 Cigars?

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?

Unknown's avatarD. M. DeBacker1 Comment
Dobbs

On Down the Tallapoosa to the Gulf of Mexico

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

Unknown's avatarD. M. DeBacker1 Comment
Dobbs

Three Valuable Sawmills for Sale

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

Unknown's avatarD. M. DeBackerLeave a comment
Family

That Was Too Easy!

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!

Unknown's avatarD. M. DeBackerLeave a comment
Family

Another Find in the 1950 US Census

I have located one other great-grandparent in the 1950 US Census. It was not difficult to find my great-grandmother, Catherine “Beanie” Kollros, because I knew the address of her home in Louisville, Kentucky. She and my great-grandfather, Jojo Kollros purchased a home in Louisville in the early 1920s. During the Great Depression, they almost lost the three-story house and they began taking in boarders. To … Continue reading Another Find in the 1950 US Census

Unknown's avatarD. M. DeBackerLeave a comment
Spiegel

Found One!

It has been a couple of weeks since the United States Census for 1950 was made available to the public after a 72-year wait. Although it is freely available on several family history websites such as ancestry.com and familysearch.org, there is still a lack of indexes that makes it very difficult to find particular individuals without knowing their address and being able to reference that … Continue reading Found One!

Unknown's avatarD. M. DeBacker2 Comments
Family

My Mother’s Memoir – Part Two

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 1978by Dorothy Patricia … Continue reading My Mother’s Memoir – Part Two

Unknown's avatarD. M. DeBackerLeave a comment