I had been meaning to get these rolls of microfilm for years ever since I read abstracts of them online and in a book at the Library of Congress. The advice of most genealogy authors is to carefully trace a line one generation at a time. You're not supposed to jump back and forth from generation to generation or even skip a generation. To do this you must carefully and painstakingly try to recreate your ancestor's life brick by brick, or rather document by document.
According to my preliminary research, they supposedly contain deeds of the Womble line I'm researching. This line starts with my paternal grandmother, Laura Virginia Womble Blickensderfer (1902-1975). Her father was John Albert Womble (1866-1944), who was the son of John Washington Womble (1815-1896). His father was John Womble (Abt.1756-1820). I've been working on this line off and on since the early 1990's. The deeds I'm interested in concern John Washington Womble and his mother, Catharine Green(e) Womble (1778-1843). I've finally gotten to the point in my research where I feel that I have enough information to finally take a look at these documents. My hope is that they will piece together the family's migration from Edgecombe County, North Carolina to Western Tennessee. So, I sit and wait patiently with anticipation for these rolls of microfilm.
You may say to yourself, "I just couldn't just sit back and wait like that, how can someone do that?!" My answer to you is this, take up another activity while you wait. Because unless you've got a sizable bankroll, which I don't know anyone who's interested in genealogy who does, you could do some more research on another line or on the same line.
I prefer to take up another activity while I wait. In this case, it's reading. The book I'm reading now is something that my husband brought home from the library for me. It's a biography titled Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History by Yuente Huang. So far this has been a great read about the fictional detective and his real-life counterpart. The book is starting out with the life of Chang Apana, who worked as a police officer for the Honolulu Police Department. Mr. Huang's introduction says that the book will talk about Officer Apana's life and then go on to talk about Earl Derr Biggers' controversial creation, the fictional Honolulu detective, Charlie Chan.
Mr. Biggers' Charlie Chan character developed into forty plus Hollywood movies. I always think of these films as being part of the film industry's golden era. I've never read Biggers' Chan mysteries, so I can't speak about the racial stereotyping of these books. I have; however, seen a great number of the Charlie Chan movies and see the stereotype that many people find offensive. Along with this though, I've seen something else which hopefully Mr Huang will touch on his book. That is the assimilation of immigrants into the American culture.
I always noticed that Mr. Chan's sons, who are featured in most of the Charlie Chan movies I've seen, while they present the stereotypes of the past, their characters seem to be more adapted to the mainstream American culture of that bygone era. This appears to be to the degree that it irritates Charlie Chan, while the rest of the cast thinks nothing of their Americanized behavior and speech. His sons seem very much aware of their assimilation into the American culture and don't appear to have an issue with it. This even gets to the point where in one movie, one of the sons uses his ability to flit back and forth between the stereotypical Chinese roll everyone expects and his everyday American college student self as a way to outwit the movie's villains. It would be great if this was brought up in a discussion about these films, but everyone seems so focused on the negative stereotypes of these movies and doesn't see the larger picture that Charlie Chan character seems to represent the past and his assimilated children are the future. I have never seen many films that deal with the subject. Sure, you can say that a movie like Fiddler on the Roof deals with this subject, but the movie is set in Russia not the United States. Most on the Charlie Chan movies that I've seen occur on U. S. soil.
