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We continued to focus on the World War I Draft material this month and continued to find a significant number of cards for family members. As stated last month, the number of facts we are finding is surprising, especially with regard to full names, dates, and often, spouses or parents.
Our research is now up through the letter "O" and so far we have located 880 cards. We will continue to work on these during the month of July and plan to finish up as soon as possible. We have a disproportionate number of family members toward the end of the alphabet (Whiteheads of course, but also Peacocks, Southerlands, etc.) so we would expect that we will come close to doubling the number of cards by the end of the search process.
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Our thanks to Martha Whitehead Faw and her family for making a trip to Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Clarke County, Georgia. We had a few tombstone photographs from this cemetery, but not of the Whiteheads buried there. They located a number of tombstones and we posted them to the site in late June.
We also picked up about 200 other tombstone photographs from Jackson, Clarke, and Barrow Counties in Georgia and we will be working our way through these as time permits.
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| For some reason it dawned on us to talk to my mother this month about her childhood and about my Father's mother. What we learned intrigued us since there were a number of facts we had assumed about them that were absolutely wrong. Without these conversations these facts would have been lost to time and never recorded. |
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opportunities continued...
As an example, we had assumed that my mother was born in Quincy, Florida because her father was somewhat of a journeyman contractor that had worked his way from Jacksonville, Florida across the panhandle of Florida. Eventually the family settled in Cook County, Georgia. Our assumption was that my mother was born in Quincy because it was one stop along the road.
What we learned from her was that the family was already living in Adel, Cook County, Georgia when she was born. She was born in Quincy because of the influenza epidemic of 1918. Her parents believed that the children had a better chance of survival if she went to Florida, and so my mother was born there instead of her home in Adel.
A second example concerned my paternal grandmother, but more about that next month.
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The conversation with my mother led us to ask the question "What do our oldest living relatives know about themselves and about the oldest relatives they can remember?" Just as importantly, "Do we have it down on paper?"
I remember my mother's parents, but never knew her grandparents. She remembers them, so can I get her to recall what she remembers and get it down on paper? My mother also knew my paternal grandmother, and she has already told us things about her that we did not know. If she can remember anything about them, then we can possibly span some fraction of knowledge of the family from 1848 to 2007.
Who is your oldest living relative? What do they remember about their grandparents? Can you interview them and get it down on paper? |
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