Faced with an early termination fee for my mistakenly purchased annual Adobe Premiere Pro subscription (that is, annual paid monthly), I decided on a new video project instead of canceling. I’ve dubbed it “A Plan 9 From Outer Space”—If you know, you know.. The project involved restoring and then animating a series of old photographs using Adobe Firefly, with the final video edited in Premiere … Continue reading The Making of ‘Night Gallery’
A few years ago, my brother Patrick, while on a business trip to Atlanta, paid a visit to our great-grandfather’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia, and there he bought me a book titled “A Short History of Cobb County in Georgia” by Sarah Temple. Several chapters of the book are devoted to the details of what occurred in Cobb County in the spring and early summer … Continue reading Marietta July 1864
For years, I’ve been trying to unravel the mystery surrounding my mother’s great-grandfather’s civil rights status at the close of the Civil War. I believed I had finally solved it: Was he among the thousands denied property and civil rights due to specific criteria? These categories included former Confederate civil and military officers above a certain rank, individuals who had abandoned U.S. government or military … Continue reading Reconstruction Recall
Aside from being a national holiday, the Fourth of July is extra special for my family. It’s the shared birthday of my maternal grandfather, James Monroe Dobbs, Jr., and his father, James Monroe, Sr. Here is an excerpt from Gathering More Leaves, Part I: Chapter One It came like a long-forgotten letter finally delivered. In the spring of 2022, when the U.S. government released the … Continue reading My Maternal Grandfather
While browsing the internet, I have on two occasions come across portrait paintings that are presented as depictions of my ancestors. On one occasion, I discovered an image on Ancestry.com that another researcher was using as a profile portrait for our shared ancestor, Evan Prothro. My initial inclination was to simply copy this image and use it as the profile picture for my mother’s 2X … Continue reading Solving Mysteries with Google Lens
I suspected that a wealth of information regarding the Pickering’s and collateral families of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts lay hidden within out-of-print 19th-century books. Furthermore, I believed other genealogists were, and had been, investigating these same family lines, placing them years—even decades—ahead of me. These realizations prompted me to adopt new and radical research technique. I began by gathering information from personal trees on Ancestry.com’s OneWorld section. While recognizing … Continue reading PART X – CHAPTER FOUR
I’ve been procrastinating since April, but now finally getting back to working on my book, Gathering More Leaves. I’m up to the tenth and final part of the book, which will probably be about seven chapters. Originally, I was hoping to be completed by my 70th birthday next month, but that’s not likely to happen (although I am committed to working on this every day). … Continue reading PART X – CHAPTER 1
I paid $20 for a month of ChatGPT Pro to see how it could help me with editing the rewrite of my book on Family History, Gathering Leaves. I have been working on this rewrite called Gathering More Leaves for about two years, and I am perpetually stuck in the middle of the book. Parts of the original book were generated using software specifically designed … Continue reading Imagine Me and You. I do.
Growing up, I had no idea I had Colonial American ancestors on both my parents’ sides. My mother’s colonial ancestors settled in the South, from the Carolinas to Georgia. My father’s ancestors were YANKEES! These are all ancestors of my father who settled either in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Plymouth Colony, the Rhode Island Plantation Colony, or they are the ancestor of ancestors who … Continue reading Massachusetts Ancestors with Wikipedia Articles
When my great grandfather James M Dobbs was appointed to a consul generalship in South America at the start of the 2nd Cleveland Administration, his name appeared in newspapers all over the United States. In the majority of those appearances, it was one item in a list of other men who had been appointed to an office that April in 1893. Most of the newspapers … Continue reading International Man of Mystery Part 6
Gathering Leaves 