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
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!
I found my maternal grandfather in the 1950 US census using my patented needle in a haystack method. I knew that my grandfather, James Monroe Dobbs, Jr., and his second wife, Helen Mewhinney Dobbs lived somewhere in Temple Texas in 1950. A few days ago I did find my great-grandmother in the 1950 census in the city of Temple residing in a convalescent home shortly … Continue reading Needle In A Haystack
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
Even though access to the US census for 1950 is limited due to the lack of indexes, a few of the states have been indexed and it is a work in progress. For areas that have not been indexed, there is an alternative to having to browse through hundreds of images trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. At Ancestry.com there is the … Continue reading 1950 Census District Finder
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!
Gathering Leaves 