Since September 2019, I have consistently published a weekly sketch every Friday. In June 2022, I began publishing a second post every Thursday, sharing records of enslaved people of Greene County, Georgia (more on that below). As you can imagine, this means a lot of time is spent researching and writing. It helps that most of the sketches are in a timeline format of an ancestor’s life (birth to death and everything in between), so once I do the research, they basically write themselves. My motto is “I’m not a writer but I don’t let that stop me” so I take all the help I can get.
As you probably noticed, the blog is organized by pages (two lines of tabs just below the header on the main landing page). In 2019, there were 5; there are now 10 (excluding the Home page). Below is a short description of each.
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Blog tabs (click to enlarge) |
52 Ancestors (1 and 2). This was originally a single page to track posts for the 52 Ancestors challenge created by Amy Johnson Crow. Her challenge helped kickstart my blog, which I seriously considered deleting at one point in 2019. I no longer take part in the challenge but kept the 52 Ancestors category. As the page neared 400 entries, it grew slow and cumbersome, forcing me to create a second page. Page 1 contains posts from 2014 to 2022 and page 2 begins with posts from 2023.
Bairdstown Cemetery. This page contains links to posts documenting my connection to the souls buried in this small-town Georgia cemetery. There were 11 posts on this page by September 5, 2019; today there are 41.
Penfield, Georgia. This new page is my version of a one place study. Many of my paternal ancestors lived in Penfield so it helps me to have everything I know about Penfield in one place.
Enslaved People of Greene County, Georgia. This page was created in June 2022 after I was contacted by documentary filmmaker Macky Alston who discovered my Dawson Grays and Penfield pages (see below) and my story of the three children who died in the well on Lankford land. Like mine, his ancestor served with the Dawson Grays during the Civil War, lived in Penfield, and owned slaves. He is passionate about helping the descendants of families our ancestors enslaved and works with the Greene County African American Museum to honor those buried on the other side of the wall in Penfield Cemetery. He also works to help clean up and restore the graves of the enslaved buried in the cemetery as well as to help their descendants piece together their family’s histories pre-emancipation. Knowing I often come across slave names in my research, I offered to post what I find for any who lived in Greene County. This page contains a list of what I have posted to date.
Co. C, 3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment. My 3rd great-grandfather, James Meriweather Lankford, served with this regiment for a short time during the Civil War before providing a substitute and moving to the Georgia State Troops. Other Lankford and Hobbs family members from Penfield served with Company C, “the Dawson Grays,” with at least one losing his life at Gettysburg. I often searched the internet and historical newspapers for “Dawson Grays” hoping to find something of interest. Over time, I realized the news often reported the regiment’s movements so started compiling what I found. This page, created in August 2021, is my version of a one place study and contains the results of that research.
Honor Roll. This page, which contains links to my posts of family members who have served in the military, has grown considerably since my 8th blogiversary. Hopefully no one has been left out.
Family Treasures. This page was created in March 2020 to document family treasures. It now contains 45 items.
Ralph Murphy Slides. My husband’s aunt gifted him over 6000 slides of photos taken by her husband (my husband’s uncle). I have been fascinated by what I uncovered after converting the slides to digital so periodically dedicate a weekly post using these photos. This page was created in November 2021 to keep the series of photos together. In July 2023, an interesting thing happened with the Warner’s Skyline Drive-In Theater post, which I told you about in my 8th blogiversary recap. I was contacted by someone from the Clarksburg History Museum seeking permission to create a display of these historical photos at their museum. Once they agreed to my conditions, I sent files so they could print and frame a selection of photos. I think Uncle Ralph would have been proud to know his photos will become part of Clarksburg’s history. They even told me if I ever decide to publish a book of the photos, they would be happy to sell copies in their museum store! They were also interested in other photos featuring Clarksburg and Nutter Fort and shared links on their Facebook page. I had several conversations with the women from the museum over the span of a week—very nice people.
Heirloom Recipes. A small list of family recipes created in November 2018. The page has only grown by three recipes since created so perhaps I should look to see what else should be added.
In 2019, I mentioned several projects I wanted to undertake. I am happy to say I did indeed tackle each of them, surpassing my expectations on two of them. These projects and my progress on each are detailed below:
World War II letter project. Several years ago, my brother-in-law Randy shared two boxes of letters (over 300 in all) his father, Johnnie Marston, had written to his mother during World War II. Anyone who researches their family history can tell you how exciting something like that is. At first, Randy and I discussed publishing a book, but I was not sure how to go about that so instead, took the blogging route. This was a high priority goal for me and one too large for my Living in the Past blog, so I created another blog last year named I Miss You a Lot and I Love You a Million. But before I published the first post, I had a lot of work to do to get organized. All the letters had to be sorted, photographed, put in chronological order, and transcribed into a Word document. Once that was done, I wrote an introductory sentence or two for each letter. Of course, the blog needed photos, so I worked with Randy to gather family photos and his father’s war memorabilia. After taking photos of everything, I researched various events from within the letters and troop movements to enhance the project. And finally, I re-named and filed all the digital files for easy retrieval when I had questions along the way. I am currently adding details from the 337th Infantry Operations Reports to add context to what the Regiment was going through since Johnnie was unable to do so. The introductory post was published on August 11, 2022 and weekly since then. Once posted, I share the link on Facebook and X, previously known as Twitter. I know this project means a lot to Randy and his family and I am learning a lot about the war along the way.
Publish a series on Mama’s volunteer activities. This one is near and dear to my heart and, thankfully, in 2020, I published three in a series of six planned posts.
- Giving back, part 1—Oregon fires
- Giving back, part 2—North Carolina floods
- Giving back, part 3—1996 Atlanta Olympics
I say thankfully because we lost mama in April 2022. And again, thankfully before she passed, I interviewed her on multiple occasions so have enough information to complete the series (see below).
- Giving back, part 4—Kiwanis
- Giving back, part 5—Senior Centers
- Giving back, part 6—Red Cross Miscellaneous
I have work to do with paperwork and photos I kept from her estate so it may be a while before I finish the series, but I will. I believe she loved these stories. Before publishing, I often called her with questions, and always read the draft to her to get her approval. She was meticulous in her details and wanted me to get it right. Once the draft was approved, she would ask me when it would be published, until it was. I miss her.
Share reunion news articles related to Company C, 3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Dawson Grays). As noted above, this project ended up being much more than reunion news articles but I wanted it to be all about the Dawson Grays, not just the articles so I started researching every soldier on the roster (as I knew it to be) and then wrote a short paragraph detailing their activities during the Civil War. I then used the news articles to create a timeline specific to Company C.
Going forward, I will probably add a new page now that I made a commitment to myself to help tell the stories of some of the people buried at Hillcrest Cemetery, an abandoned cemetery in East Point, Georgia. My grandfather rests there so the cemetery is of great interest to me. A wonderful volunteer has been taking care of the cemetery (fundraising, overseeing maintenance, maintaining its records and a website, etc.) for years and recently asked for stories about people buried there to highlight on the Hillcrest Cemetery Memorial Association Facebook page. I periodically search the historical newspapers looking for Hillcrest obituaries to update Find A Grave memorials for that cemetery so have already done some of research so I thought why not. My first contribution was the story of the Overstreet-Bacon families who died in the 1938 Terminal Hotel fire in Atlanta, although technically, it is my fourth story if I count three already written for family members buried there.
To date, I have posted 544 stories with a total pageview count of 174,993. Once published, I share each post on my Facebook timeline, one to two genealogy Facebook pages, and X. Most of the views are from the United States, but Bloggers analytics tell me other countries are viewing too, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland, and Ukraine, among others. None of my posts have gone viral (not that I expected them to), however, seven of them have had four-digit views:
- Hurricane Agnes floods Manassas in 1972 (3216 views)
- Warner’s Skyline Drive-In Theater (3045 views)
- Going to the library (2940 views)
- Elizabeth Ann Lankford, one of many Lankford’s buried at Bairdstown Cemetery (2151 views)
- Mother’s Day tribute to Grandma Shields (2058 views)
- Don’t throw those negatives away! (1303 views)
- Vintage Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Plush Toys (1032 views)
I have made great progress in researching my husband’s Scottish ancestry after breaking through a couple of brick walls. When I started researching these families, my mother-in-law and her brothers could only name their paternal grandparents and 5 of the now documented 11 aunts and uncles. I can now document the Athya, Durie, Braidwood, and Liddell lines to the mid-1700s. The ScotlandsPeople website has been worth every penny I have spent to download birth, marriage, and death records. Since September 2019, I have published 24 sketches on these and other Scottish lines. It has been very exciting. I just wish my mother-in-law were alive to hear the stories.
All this work takes a great deal of time, and luckily, I retired last December, so have plenty of that. But I still have two projects I need to fit in. The first one is to sort/file paperwork gathered before it became easy to file digitally. Early in my research, I physically visited various locations and copied everything I found on whomever I was researching at the time. Now I stay home and research online so download and store digital copies on my computer (and of course a back-up drive). I have several boxes of paper that needs my attention. I also need to update the many family notebooks I put together years ago. Part of that comes with physically filing something since that is where it goes, but I would also need to update family group sheets and various reports for each family as I do that.
The other project I need to work on is labeling photos. I started working on this project during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Every night before going to bed, I labeled at least 10 photos but sometimes more. I did this religiously for several months, placing many in archive quality plastic sleeves and notebooks, but I did not finish. I still have a mid-size box full left to deal with—it is a never-ending struggle as I am sure many of you know. With all that needs to be done, I am considering taking a hiatus from my blog posts to take care of these two items. One possibility could be to dedicate one day a week to file and label, something I already do for the three blogs I publish. I struggle with this though because I enjoy the research and writing. Until I make that decision, I plan to continue what I have been doing.
I would like to thank those of you who follow me on this journey. I have learned so much about my ancestors and history in general over the past 12 years. Perhaps you have as well.
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