Sitting Under The Family Tree

Sentimental Sunday – You Can’t Go Home Again

August 25, 2012 by cchidlow

You can’t go home again. Well….. you can but it’s a pretty bumpy trip. Things have changed, people have moved and you feel the disappointment of discovering that childhood is just a memory and you really are that old woman in the mirror. But I digress.

Last year when I visited my daughter in Pennsylvania, I also spent a few days with my brother and sister-in-law. Of course my brother and I had to do the sentimental journey and visit the old neighborhoods.

First row House

First place we visited was the house we lived in when my brother was born. The sad little row housewasn’t as big as he remembered. It was run down, in need of paint and the postage stamp sized front yard was full of weeds. It was just a big disappointment. But I took pictures for remembrance. I had never lived there but he had so that was important to me.

Second Row House

The second place we visited was the house where the family lived when I was born. I marched right up to the door to ask the resident if it would be o.k. to take some pictures. I was hoping he would ask us in but it was obvious from peaking in the door that he was awaiting the Horders TV production team to arrive any minute to start filming. We did chat for a while and I told him that the tree out front was planted by my father the year I was born. He said there used to be a lot of trees on the street but they had all died except for the one in front of his house. I took pictures of the house and the tree. We moved from there when I was about two years old.

Finally we went back to the old neighborhood, the house that I remembered growing up. It was gone. Just…… gone. It had been torn down years ago. I wasn’t shocked because my brother had told me it was gone. But it was startling to see that vacant lot where once a home had stood. I remember my Dad used to say that if they ever tore our house down the rest of the block would fall since we had a three store and the rest of the block was all two-story. But our house was gone and the rest of the block or row houses still stood. I saw that the first house’s address proved that three houses had been torn down, not just mine. They must have been very narrow houses even though I remember our house as being big. Very big. I scooped up a brick left behind on the vacant lot where my childhood home had been, (that gave TSA cause to pause when it showed up in my luggage x-ray), took a bunch of pictures, got back in the car and turned my back on the old neighborhood. I won’t go back.

Sad for sure, but a good way to remember that the people hold your heart and memories, not the places. My brother and I spent the evening doing the “remember whens” and the “remember whos” until tears ran down my face with laughter. It was a good journey down memory lane but I guess you really can’t go home again.

My Tree

Posted in Family History, Genealogy, Life | Tagged advice, ancestors, Carol Chidlow, childhood, family history, family home, Genealogy, history, home, life, pennsylvania, row house, Sibling | 6 Comments »

Tombstone Tuesday – A Family Place

August 21, 2012 by cchidlow

Family cemeteries have always intrigued me. I think about the family stories that could be told and my gene-sense starts tingling. Why are they where they are? What’s the relationship between the people buried there?

Occasionally I pass a small family cemetery with a big wrought iron gate with the letter “A” on it. One day recently the gate was open when I was driving by and I just happened to have my camera with me. So I turned in and started taking pictures in case they were not listed on Find-A-Grave. Another car pulled up and the lady told me it was her family cemetery. I think she thought I was a vandal. But after introducing myself and telling her why I was there, she told me about the cemetery and her family.

The Asbell family had homestead 1,000 plus acres there in Levy County, Florida in the 1800s and at some point they had set aside a few acres for the family cemetery. Eventually the family has fenced it in and put up the gate. There are only 11 graves there and a few are only memorial stones since the people are buried in other nearby cemeteries. The oldest tombstones are of her grandparents. She was more than glad to allow me to photograph the stones and although I found that they are already mapped on Find-A-Grave, I did take one picture that was not posted so I felt as though I accomplished a good thing.

I am sharing them with you here on Tombstone Tuesday. J. Shelton and Ila W. Asbell are the pioneers buried here.

Asbell Family Cemetery

Posted in Life | 1 Comment »

Making the Best of a Rainy, Saturday Afternoon

August 18, 2012 by cchidlow

I have to admit, I’m not a real good genealogist. So far I haven’t checked out any wills, deeds, property sales or anything like that. And I hop around a lot. When I get bored not finding anything on one ancestor I hop over to research another. All the books tell you not to do that. It’s a genealogy no-no. But I have a lot of fun with my family research. I mean, it’s all out there somewhere and as far as all that boring stuff is concerned, it’s not going anywhere. I am confident that it will still be there if I ever get around to going after it.

But talking to people, finding obscure jewels of gossip and factoids about the family makes me smile. It’s the detective spirit in me I guess. I love a good mystery. Here’s one thing I did early on in my journey that really paid off. At the time I didn’t have a lot of information. I knew where my grandparents were buried because I’d been to several family funerals there. My father is buried alongside them and his were the only dates I had. One Saturday afternoon I got out my paper with the names on it and called the Blandford Cemetery office in Petersburg, Virginia. A very nice lady named Jackie answered the phone and I asked her if by any chance I could get some information from their files. She said “sure”.

I gave her the surname I was looking for and boy, did she give it to me! Every person in that cemetery with the same last name was fair game. Apparently it was a rainy Saturday afternoon in Petersburg and Jackie was bored. She gave me the names of all of them, birth dates, death dates and more information then I could have hoped for. Before the 1950s the cemetery records contained the place of birth and the cause of death for the deceased. The German tradition of everyone being buried together meant that most of the children were buried in the family plot. That is how I found out that my grandmother and several of the older boys were born in Rockingham County, Virginia. Never knew that. I thought they came from Petersburg, Philadelphia or North Dakota. That’s the only places I ever heard of when I was growing up. She also gave me all their addresses when they died, funeral homes that took care of the arrangements, birth dates, etc. I ended that afternoon with a new best friend and tons of data to include in my family tree. I spent the rest of the day grinning like an idiot.

A few weeks later, trying to get my hands on my grandfather’s death certificate was proving to be a complicated chore. But because of my new friend Jackie, I knew the funeral home so I called them and asked if they had records that went back that far. Apparently they keep those records forever and the gentleman I talked to informed me that I wouldn’t find a death certificate in Virginia because my grandfather had died in Philadelphia and was shipped home to be buried in Petersburg. Well that little tidbit made all the difference in the world. With it I was able to find a death certificate. Never did find an obituary though.

So the next boring afternoon you’re sitting around wondering which direction to take your research, back up, regroup and do some thinking outside the box. The least normal idea just might pay off.

Grandmother Volz

Posted in Family History, Genealogy, Life | Tagged Advise, Carol Chidlow, cemetery, Family, family history, family tree, Funeral, Funeral home, Genealogy, history, Petersburg Virginia, Philadelphia, Saturday, Virginia | 2 Comments »

Put Some Flesh On Those Bones

August 16, 2012 by cchidlow

Facts and figures make up the bulk of information that genealogists collect, chart, and savor. We’ve got those dates memorized, got the family names etched in our memories and we’ve got city, states and street names documented solidly on our family trees.

You may know that grandpa was a miller. Or grandma could have been the first female doctor in her county. But unless you are blessed with diaries and family papers, you don’t know much about the day-to-day lives of all those people who make us who we are. And you may never know. But with a little detective work you can find out what was happening around them while they went through life.

As an example let’s look at my great-grandfather who was a private in the Confederacy. I did find his army records in the national archives and paid a handsome price to get a copy of them. What I learned was shocking. It appears that every so often during the whole war, he went AWOL, then came back. What? How could that be? My ancestor a deserter? No way.

Enter a great magazine named Civil War Times. My local library has this magazine and it’s full of Civil War history as well as what was happening in communities both north and south during the war. What I found out was that in the South they thought the war would be short-lived. They only signed up for one year so they had to have all kinds of incentives to keep the boys fighting. I discovered that my ancestor like a lot of farmers, went home every spring to put a crop in the field. So he wasn’t a deserter after all. He was just a farmer who needed to provide for his family.

Another ancestor of an extended family member migrated from Ireland along with so many of his relatives. What was happening in his life to encourage them all to immigrate at the same time? A short history lesson about the potato famine answered that question fast. So now I had insight into his life. He lived in a rural area, probably a farmer and couldn’t feed his family because of the potato famine. So many Irish immigrated to the United States and Canada for the very same reason. Second only to the Germans, the Irish immigration was one of the largest groups of new citizens to North America.

So many magazines like Civil War Times, Military History, Colonial Times, WWII or Wild West will give you a peek into the life styles of our ancestors. You’ll find occupations, hair styles, fashion, and lots of little details that you just don’t know from reading facts and figures. The larger bookstores like Books-A-Million and Barnes and Noble have huge magazine sections. You can sit there for hours, making notes and not spend a dime. But it is nice to buy at least one magazine so you don’t appear a total cheapskate.

Libraries also have many, many magazines of interest to the genealogist. And some libraries will get a subscription to one that you want to read if you ask them.

Civil War Wife

I know it’s not as great as finding diaries, family Bibles, journals and letters but magazines that tell the history of different periods when your ancestors were alive can help you put a little flesh on the bones of your research.

Posted in Family History, Genealogy, Life, Names | Tagged American Civil War, Books-A-Million, Carol Chidlow, civil war, Civil War Times, Confederate States of America, family history, Genealogy, Grandparent, history, Military History, records, research | 4 Comments »

Where ‘Ya From, Babe?

August 15, 2012 by cchidlow

“Where ‘ya from, babe”? When someone asks me this they usually don’t say “babe” and I usually answer “Philadelphia”. But ask the same question to some glassy-eyed genealogist who has just spent the better part of a day staring at a microfilm reader screen and they just might answer “I can trace my family back to Princess Nose in the Air and the Earl of Dirt”.

Does it really matter who your ancestors were? Really? On my Dad’s side I come from a long line of blacksmiths and dirt farmers on one side and shoemakers on the other. My Mom’s side has some German merchants on her father’s and on her Mom’s side they really did have a few Earls, Ladies and Lords. There’s even an Earl who fought in the Crusades, was killed in Jerusalem and his body was buried there but his head was sent back home to Garendon Abbey near Loughborough, a house endowed by his wife’s family. That must have smelled good by the time it got there. Yuck!

My husband’s children from his first marriage can trace their ancestry back to Thomas Wyatt the poet, reported to be a confidant of Anne Boleyn. Thomas himself was eventually beheaded by Henry the Eighth but not for fooling around with Anne. Apparently he was a bit of a radical and didn’t see things the same way Henry did. From there they go back to Edward the first.

The major advantage to finding royalty in your lineage is that there’s literally tons of genealogy research already done and it’s just sitting out there waiting for you to come along and claim it. Also, since Thomas Wyatt was a published poet, I was able to get modern copies of his books for the boys for Christmas. Other than that I don’t see the advantage but I’m sure there must be some. Perhaps it just makes your tree bigger.

The Volz boys, shoemakers all

Personally, I just love my dirt farmers and shoemakers. They were hard-working folks. They settled in parts of the country that needed strong individuals and I’m proud to be their descendant. But I sure wish they had left some written record of their daily lives. Putting some flesh on the bones would make me downright goofy.

Posted in Life | Leave a Comment »

I Am The Keeper Of The Pictures – Well, Some Of Them

August 12, 2012 by cchidlow

I used to think that I didn’t really have many family photos. I had a few and my Aunt Agnes game me some but it really wasn’t very many and I had none of my parents when they were young. But when I connected with a few fourth cousins online, they shared their pictures with me. Then my father-in-law made me the keeper of all his family photos including all the ones he took during WW II when he was in Italy. Plus I harassed a cousin of mine until she sent me her pictures so I could copy them. Really, I harassed her. I gave my genealogy guru a phone card and she called my cousin every three or four months for three years. Finally got the photos and you bet I took my sweet time getting them back to her.

Then the question became what to do with them all. Oh I could get really organized and scan them all and post them in my family tree. Boring!! (I really do plan to still do that). But I wanted to do something different. A neighbor of mine has an ancestor wall just inside their front door. Of course she has very expensive frames, real wood panelling as a background and it’s really first class all the way. I wanted to do the same thing but on a more limited budget. Like, no budget.

Never one to make a firm committment to color I decided to make my background temporary. So my daughter and I got a large piece of dry wall, covered it with a beautiful piece of rusty tomato colored synthetic suede and my husband attached it to the wall. Wanting to keep some consistency and economy to the wall I haunted thrift shops, flea markets, yard sales and dollar stores and found all the frames I needed, painted them all black and framed pictures of both my husband’s and my families.

Then my daughter and I put a huge piece of craft paper on the floor and shuffled the frames around until we liked the composition. We drew outlines of all the frames, taped the craft paper to the material, put up the pictures and then tore off the craft paper.

I have to admit it looked really great and I’ve got so many complements on my wall. At a glance I could see where I came from. It seems to help me stay grounded to know where I’m going. Even my brother liked it when he came to visit.

Ancestor Wall

Since then, I have received more photos that I would like to put up. Plus I have become bored with the colors so I have started taking the frames down, and I plan to paint them all white, change the material to a light turquoise and put the frames back up in a different configuration. I’ve found some better quality frames at the thrift shops and antique malls so I will be changing out some of the old frames.

The main change I’m doing this time is hanging them with Command hangers. The newer ones that are kind of like Velcro work fantastic. I’ve hung stuff on them and they lay flush with the wall and they will hold a lot of weight. So I feel confident that they will hold my frames just great.

I’m confident you will find a unique way to showcase your favorite family photos. This is just the one I like.

Posted in Family History, Genealogy, Life | Tagged Charity shop, color, crafts, Image, Italy, Photograph, picture frames, Shopping, Supplies, Velcro, Visual Arts | 3 Comments »

But Can You Believe It?

August 10, 2012 by cchidlow

I just love the digital age, don’t you? Technology improves, information on the internet swells and genealogy research becomes easier. A birth certificate here, a family tree with your ancestors in it there and your own tree grows and grows. It’s like watering weeds.

But can you trust the data you gather? If it proves to be wrong, how can you get it corrected? For several years I’ve been trying to get another generation back on a gg grandfather who lived in Virginia but was born in Maryland. In checking records on another ancestor, I found where this one was listed in several public family trees. I was so excited. It listed his parents, grand parents and siblings, etc. Then I noticed something that didn’t quite jibe. North Carolina was given as the birth place for this guy. So I started going forward and found that someone had taken my great grandmother and plugged her and her husband into their tree, showing her as the daughter of their gg grandfather with the same name as mine. John Hedrick’s a pretty common name. Especially in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Apparently in North Carolina as well.

So I checked several others and found they had all done the same thing. After contacting one of the owners of the tree, she responded that she had just copied the information from another tree. Advising her that the information was not correct and everyone descending from that mistake were now listed in her family tree and we were not related. Her response amazed me. “Oh well, I got it off the internet, so it must be right. I think you are wrong.” Really? I have asked her to remove it from her tree and have contacted several other tree owners but so far, no luck. I guess I’m going to share granny whether I like it or not, but I am sad for other researchers who will be misdirected.

Another case of misinformation that I contend with just cracks me up every time I think about it. I had heard rumors that my mother’s birth certificate was wrong so I got a copy of it for my records. Oh boy was it ever wrong! According to the State of Pennsylvania, my mother was born in June, not July, and spelled her name with an i instead of an e. It also says she is a male. Yes, you are reading this correctly. It says she is a male. Please believe me when I say my mother was not a male and did not have a sex change. I don’t even think they had sex changes in the early 1900s.

Frances Claire Craven

Have you ever tried to convince the State of Pennsylvania or any other state for that matter, that they were wrong and could they please, just this once, correct a century old mistake? Forgetaboutit!

So I live with these little gigglers, make notes on my own tree and not let it worry me. I can always use a good laugh.

Posted in Life | Tagged birth certificates, Carol Chidlow, family history, family trees, Genealogy, history, Internet, research advise | Leave a Comment »

Obituaries Can Be Your Friends

August 7, 2012 by cchidlow

Genealogists are a ghoulish bunch. We talk about dead people all the time, we spend hours in cemeteries where we rarely know anyone buried there and we get absolutely silly about obituaries. If you find a printed obituary about one of your ancestors you may have hit pay dirt for information. One thing to remember about obituaries is that the person who gives the information out usually knew the deceased well and the data is pretty accurate. Mostly.

Looking for inspiration to make a hit one boring day, I called the library in the town where most of my father’s family are buried. I found that the library had copies of all the old newspapers and the research librarian spent about two hours on the phone with me, finding all the obituaries she could based on death dates I gave her. I immediately sent off a check to cover copies, postage and a small donation for the library since they didn’t charge for genealogy help. In a few weeks I received a large envelope full of goodies. I spent the better part of a day reading all the obituaries. It was just like Christmas. You know that feeling. You know you do.

A good example of serendipity is the obit I received for my Aunt Agnes (my father’s older sister). My aunt Agnes was a character. She was one of the oldest of the eleven kids and my father being the youngest, she practically raised him. She drove an automobile before you had to have a license in this country, picked wild Muscadine grapes and made wine every year, held every office a woman could in the VFW auxiliary, USO and always won the best hat award at her Half Century Club meetings. Her and my Aunt Mabel went to funerals for people she didn’t even know, and when one of my uncles died, she would stay at the funeral home all night long so they wouldn’t be alone. And when the funeral was over, she would go back to the cemetery and spend hours just sitting and talking to her brother.

Even with all I thought I knew about her, the obituary gave up some great stuff. I learned that she was born in Baltimore, MD, and I always thought she was born in Petersburg, VA. I knew her grandfather was from Maryland but didn’t know the city. On a hunch I started searching Baltimore and made a few connections. I also learned that she belonged to many more groups than I had thought.

Obituaries can reveal real treasure for the family historian. Read them carefully, they’re solid gold.

Agnes Whitt

Posted in Family History, Genealogy, Life | Tagged advice, Carol Chidlow, Death, family history, family stories, funeral services, Genealogy, history, Obituary | Leave a Comment »

Tombstone Tuesday – What Does It Really Mean?

August 6, 2012 by cchidlow

Of all my ancestors I’d like to go back in time to meet it would be my paternal great grandmother Catherine (Hedrick) Sipe. She married my great grandfather Archibald Hewston Sipe shortly after he came back from fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. She gave birth to my grandmother in January of 1869 and died in March the same year. I wonder if she died from complication of child birth. Seems possible but without documentation I’ll never know.

Catherine F. Sipe

A few things about her tombstone leave me with more questions than answers. For one thing it says Consort of Archibald Sipe. Unusual to use the word consort instead of wife. I do have a copy of their marriage bans so I am pretty sure they were married. Or did she change her mind and not to marry the man? Soon after she died the baby was left with Catherine’s parents to raise. Archibald moved on, finally marrying his third wife and settling in North Dakota not very far from the homestead of Catherine and her husband, my grandfather. But that’s a story for another day.

Also she is buried over by the fence of the cemetery instead of with her mother and father which is the German custom. Burials along the fence of cemeteries sometimes indicate a suicide, witch, harlot, take your pick. Several years ago the DAR mapped the entire cemetery but made no note of Catherine. What’s that all about? I only found it because another relative went to the cemetery to look for it and sent me the information.

In the dark and wondering why, I will continue to try to find the answers.

Posted in Family History, Genealogy, Life, Names | Tagged Carol Chidlow, cemeteries, civil war, family history, Genealogy, grandparents, headstone, history, marriage, research, taphophilia, tombstones | 3 Comments »

I Got It On E-Bay

August 4, 2012 by cchidlow

I love Ebay. I’m always amazed at the stuff ( junk) people buy. And what they pay for it. Now don’t get me wrong. I really do love Ebay and I’ve bought my share of stuff (junk) at some ridiculous prices. And I’ve sold some.

Antique bottle embossed with family surnames

With that said, I admit I get giddy when I find things on Ebay containing my surnames. I’m always looking for Family Bibles hoping that there will be one that belonged to one of my ancestors. Rather than go through hundreds of new Bibles or Bibles with no genealogy information I just put “family bibles and genealogy” in the Ebay search engine, so the results are minimal. So far I’ve never found a Bible for any of my families, but I keep on hoping and keep on trying.

Antique bottles from the early part of the last century will usually have embossing on them and humans being forever vain put their family names on their products. I’ve found bottles with Caldwell, Rothwell, Shrader, Sipe, and Craven. I got a cigar box or most of a cigar box (no lid) with Sipe on it. That was a rush.

But by far the most exciting thing I ever got on Ebay is a muscle shirt with Chidlow on it. Now Chidlow is the name of a town in Australia, near Perth. The story is that two brothers stopped there in their travels, dug a well, settled down and the area became known as Chidlow’s Well. These days it’s just called Chidlow. Through a Chidlow in Virginia I’ve got pictures of some of the Australian Chidlows. Don’t know yet if they are related to my husband’s family but they all sure have the same nose. The muscle shirt was to commemorate a Motorcycle Fair in 1990 at the Chidlow Tavern. I would have paid just about anything for it but I was lucky to win the auction for $4.50 US. However I had to pay $25 for shipping. Yeah, they got me.

But I was overjoyed.

Of course there is no connection between any of the people’s names on my bottles and my actual family. The possibility is slim to none. Now the cigar box has more promise. The Pennsylvania Sipes and the Virginia Sipes are related several generations back but I haven’t tried to find out what that relationship is yet.

The thrill of seeing a family name on a bottle, post card, cigar box or muscle shirt is a fun sidebar to the craziness of genealogy. So next time you are on Ebay looking for another salt and pepper shaker to add to your collection, give your family surnames a search and see what pops up.