Merry Christmas

Jefferson County Holiday Party

SUNDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2019

@ 2:00 – 4:00 PM

 JCNYGS HOLIDAY PARTY

JCNYGS will have its annual holiday party at Greg and Tammy Plantz home at 21787 Reed Road, Watertown. Meat will be provided—guests are asked to bring a dish to pass. 

Guests are also encouraged, although not required, to bring an unwrapped toy for the Toys for Tots Program. 

Society members and their family and friends are invited and welcomed to attend—the more the merrier. Just let Kevin know the expected number of attendees.

RSVP kleesonmedia17@gmail.com or call Kevin at 315-286-3930 or private message Kevin Leeson of Redwood on Facebook before December 6th.  

Thank you—we’ll see you there for a great time!!

Wordless Wednesday: Fourth of July Parade

In Honor of Memorial Day

Pictures from earlier this spring when I put flowers on them.

Dad & Mom

Grandpa & Grandma Ward

Grandpa & Grandma Wooster

Great-Grandpa & Grandma Wooster

Wordless Wednesday- Gingerbread Houses

Wordless Wednesday: O Christmas Tree!

Saturday Challenge Resources

 Last week's challenge from GeneaMusings in honor of the holdiay:

1)  What Genealogy Resource are you thankful for?  Is it an organization, software, websites, repositories, persons, or something else?

Here's mine:

I could list many resources that I am grateful for. Ancestry, FamilySearch, Fold3 and other on-line resources as well as our home library, the local public libraries and other repositories come to mind. My older brother is a valuable resource as he can recall things that I never knew about surrounding my family. Just recently a discussion came up where he recalled some details about the family farm that I grew up on. Perhaps trivial, but I now can fill in more details about my grandparents lives including approximately when they installed indoor plumbing and where the outhouse had been located!

My brothers, our dog and me

However, the most valuable resource that I couldn’t do any of this without is my computer. The laptop that travels all over with me is a workhorse of a tool. It enables me to write fairly quickly and without my hands cramping as they quickly do when writing by hand. That database resides on its hard drive and all those on-line sources are accessed through it. Some of them often enough that I am continuously signed in to them it seems.

Included with the computer is the removable hard drive that is it’s constant companion. This is the organization of my research, the “brain” of most of my work. The database might have a reference to where I got the information, but what about that census or vital record? Was there more in that digital book that I referenced? Over to the drive to find it. Within one folder, much like an old file cabinet, are many more folders. Major family names are listed down through.

Which family was this? Open the folder and the oldest ancestor, or the oldest I’m working with is listed on a title. Drilling down, I can quickly jump from generation to generation within the family. Each sibling is numbered in the birth order and their children are likewise located within their folder. I quickly reach the correct person and there it is, the individual record I wanted to look at! A book about the general family would have been in either the top folder or the first generation that it is about.

Yes, between the “brain” and the computer itself, these are the resources I am most grateful for. Years ago, when I started working on genealogy, I didn’t have a computer to use. A few years later, I got my first one, a Tandy ColorComputer, which was really more of a game machine than anything. It was the early days of home computers. Still I managed to fashion a chart of some of my early research with it. No more than a listing such as a simple cascading chart, it would be printed out on a small printer with paper little wider than a cash register receipt. The paper even came on a roll like the receipt paper.

From that early start, the power of the computers has greatly improved over the years, as has the sophistication of my tools and output. Now I am able to keep databases full of information, folders organized by families and produce professional quality reports with the research. With the connection to the Internet I can connect to resources and repositories that we never dreamed of reaching without much work and expense. I am definitely most grateful for the morale of my modern computer.

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Wordless Wednesday: Leaves of Halloween

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

Happy Halloween!

Even though I'm a day early for Wordless Wednesday, here's a gathering of pictures I've taken this fall for Halloween:

The Spirit House

Wordless Wednesday- Fourth on Second

Father's Day, Anniversary, and Paint

It is Father's Day; it is Rich's and my sixth wedding anniversary. I am exhausted. Rich is exhausted. What are we planning for today? Painting some part of 3 different rooms in high humidity and a possible severe thunderstorm this afternoon.

It is crunch time to get the painting done. I expect the next two weeks will be crazy; for those that don't already know, we are moving. In honor of Father's Day, I am re-posting last year's post about my Dad.

From last year's Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings Saturday Challenge:

1)  Sunday, 19 June, is Father's Day.  Let's celebrate by writing a blog post about our father, or another significant male ancestor (e.g., a grandfather).

Gordon J. Ward

 I found it hard to focus on one aspect of my father to write about. My thoughts were too scattered, especially as I try to get everything back together after a week away from home and many hours on the road. Even though he wasn't interested in genealogy, Dad would have liked the road trip aspect of our vacation. Last year and this, while on our trip to Alabama, I did something that he had once talked about doing. We had often been to the northern terminus of I-81 where it crosses into Canada north of Watertown, However, Dad had the ambition of getting from one end to the other of it someday. Someday, he wanted to reach the southern end of I-81 in Dandridge, TN. I was thinking of him Friday evening when we swung off I-40 and onto the start of I-81. 

Somewhere on Facebook, and I don't even remember now who posted this, there was a series of questions to fill in about Dad. Here are my answers. Some things would be obviously different if my brothers were to answer them as different tv shows were on when they were kids and time had passed with changes in tastes, but I would guess many of these would be fairly consistent across the years. 

1. He is sitting in front of the tv, what is he watching? M*A*S*H, any sit-com, sports

2. You are out to eat, what kind of dressing does he get? French

3. Name a food he hates: mushrooms
4. You go out to eat and have a drink, what would he order? Meat and potatoes type entrée with a diet soda

5. Favorite kind of music? 70’s era country
6. What is his nickname for you? Susie Q, Sukey Wukey
7. If he could collect one thing, what would it be? Fun times; he didn’t really collect any physical items
8. What would he eat every day if he could? Hamburg (or other beef), mashed potatoes, ice cream or pie for dessert
9. What is his favorite cereal? Corn Flakes
10. What would he never wear? A short-sleeve shirt (after he had been burned severely anyway)
11. What is his favorite sports team? Yankees

12. What is something you do he wishes you wouldn't? Get upset/cry easily- I show emotions very easily

13. You bake him a cake for his birthday, what kind is it? Any would have been fine, but he’d prefer a pie.

14. Favorite sport? Baseball/softball for actual sport. He really enjoyed walking/short hikes though.
15. What could he spend all day doing? Sitting in a campground, relaxing, reading a newspaper- Enquirer was a favorite- and people watching or chatting with anybody that came by

16. What is something he does consistently? Loved to have fun. No matter what the job was, he tried to make it fun in some way. I remember working in the convenience store that my brother co-owned with him. We had to clean all the shelves where canned goods and such were. A long tedious job, well, he’d have 2 of us compete to see who could get a length done the fastest (while of course actually cleaning it) and then give a prize to the winner. A can of soda or a bag of chips or something. Of course, the looser would probably get the same prize, but it was just to create some fun so it didn’t seem as bad a task.