Research update for August 7, 2016 (yes, I realize it’s November)

After finishing with the Sarah Daniel petition file, I thought that I would take a short break from transcribing and start work on another file the next day.  However after looking through the various files in that day’s collection I thought I would just transcribe a bit of one of the files.  I picked one of the longer files, Easter Johnson because it was so long and went into it thinking that I would stop after a page or so of transcribing.

The strange thing was that I’d been preparing myself for what I thought would be a very “dry” file, filled with all sorts of boilerplate and annoying legalese.  However, it started out with Lazarus Johnston’s will, which goes on for a page and a half and brought up various events that happened after his death.  I became so caught up in what must have happened to his children and grandchildren as a result of those events that I kept transcribing for about seven more pages.

I worked a bit more on the Easter Johnson file tonight, 10 August 2016.  And will have to force myself to walk away from it a bit, because again I find myself getting swept up into the lives of these people that I’m transcribing.  My suspicion is that even though I’m feel that the petition case is fraught with drama that the reality is that it’s just the language being used and that it’s was just “business as usual” for these family members and the legal personages involved. 

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this case and if I make more interesting discoveries when I work my way through the other petition files.  I’m making a lot of use of the Black’s Law Dictionary that David gave me several years ago and am also learning a bit of the meanings of the legalese that I’m encountering in this particular petition.

Census Research Update

Back in August I wrote about extracting census data in an effort to learn more about my great, great grandfather, John Washington Womble.  As a correction to the previous post, the Civil Districts I extracted the census data from were the 12th and 13th from the 1870 census and then the 11th Civil District from the 1880 census.  I’m curious to learn where exactly in Hardeman County, Tennessee he lived and anything else this information can tell me about his life there.

This has been a long process and I’m not finished yet, and probably haven’t even reached the tip of the iceberg.  I spent the fall going through deed indices; yes some may say that wasn’t truly a great starting point because indices don’t always contain a thorough listing of everyone in a particular book.  However, I needed a place to start and knew going in that I would need to consult the deed books themselves to truly cover all of my bases.

I even ordered a roll of microfilm of surveys for Hardeman and made several copies of surveys that were located either entirely or partially in Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10th Surveyor’s District.  This was the limit I set for what I would search in an effort to learn where his land was located, and yes I know I’m leaving out the 13th Civil District—I will cover that.

After collecting this information, which I knew wasn’t enough, I began to plat out the surveys I’d copied.  I tried using a free online program and considered purchasing an expensive program to help me plat all of these surveys.  Instead, I took the hard road and platted them by hand using graph paper, ruler, pencil, and at times a protractor when necessary.

This was time consuming, but interesting because I became drawn into what I believe may be the terrain of his neighborhood.  My thought is that John Washington Womble likely lived in the vicinity of the Hatchie River.  I could be wrong; as I haven’t finished platting all of the surveys I collected and haven’t finished my search of the properties that surrounded his.

I tried comparing my plats to the present day Hardeman County, Tennessee on Googlemaps, but still could never completely connect them enough to tie the plats with the images I found online.

While creating the plats, I found mention of a property that always seemed to be referred to in similar with sometimes varying terms:  Entry No. 953, for 2000 acres, in the name of Thomas Claiborn & others.  I first noticed this description in a land transfer from Aby Grantham to John J Womble.

The last name Claiborne is significant because it may be connected to John Washington Womble’s 2nd wife Rhoda Caroline Richardson.  Additionally, some of the property description of the land purchased by John J Womble seemed to mirror a neighboring property that coincidentally was owned by John Washington Womble, who I believe, was John J. Womble’s uncle.

I had the opportunity to visit the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah this past February when I worked the NGS booth at the RootsTech/FGS conference.  There I did a page by page search through deed book W looking for land transactions that were in the area I’d cordoned off in my mind-Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10th Surveyor’s District.  Again I saw mentioned in various deeds the infamous, Entry No. 953, for 2000 acres, in the name of Thomas Claiborn & others and made copies of those.  Hopefully, I can use that plat as an anchor in which to join all the other “puzzle pieces” of plats that I’ve already created or will create and be able to fit John Washington Womble’s plat in amongst them.

Upon returning to Virginia, I’ve ordered microfilm from the FHL of deed books W and X and once it arrives plan to continue my page by page search for properties within Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10th Surveyor’s District.

My plan is that once I’ve gathered together those plats for the Civil District 12 that I’ll then work on locating plats for the 13th Civil District and then be able to put John Washington Womble’s 1870’s neighborhood together.

Census! Census! Census!

Back in May I watched a genealogy lecture where the speaker encouraged the audience, including me, to research our ancestor’s neighborhood.  I’ve heard this many times and have written posts about the FAN club principle for this very blog.  In my genealogical research I’ve tried to learn more about John Washington Womble’s life in Tennessee and understand more as to why he left Hardeman County, moved to Nashville, and then returned to Hardeman about a year later.

I had studied before the 1870 and 1880 Hardeman County, TN census records for his household, in addition to the households of some of his children, and nephew in an effort to answer my questions.  However, I wasn’t able to learn much else that was new information.

After watching that genealogy lecture, I remembered a genealogy class assignment where I had to analyze the data of 100 people each in two different census years in an area where one of my ancestors lived.  I had really enjoyed the assignment, and decided to do something similar.  However, since John Washington Womble lived in different civil districts in 1870 and 1880, that evidence told me that he likely moved to a completely different area in the county than the one that he lived in when he left in 1873.  I felt that it would be a good idea to extract the census data from the civil district that he moved to in 1870 and 1880 in order to learn more about the neighborhood into which he moved to.

I then downloaded each of the census pages for the 11^th civil district for the census years 1870 and 1880 and created spreadsheets for each year.  Then, I began going through the pages and extracting the names, ages, race, and occupation, etc. for each resident of that district.  It was a pretty long process and not very exciting, but I felt that I discovered some clues as to why John Washington Womble moved back there when he left Nashville and perhaps even why he moved there in the first place after the Civil War.

As I extracted the data, I did come across some problems with my plan.  A few pages of the 1880 census that I was extracting data from had parts of the pages damaged.  So, I didn’t have complete information on all of the residents in that district.  I tried viewing the records using different census record providers to see if perhaps I could find undamaged records.  However I wasn’t fortunate, and decided to just leave out that information since it wasn’t available and continued extracting. 

I’m still in the process of crunching the census data for both years, but will post again if I make any new discoveries. 

Swamablog Update

I haven’t posted anything in awhile and this is to let you all know what I’ve been doing.

Dollhouse Enclosure Project

When I last wrote I had been working to enclose one of my dollhouses.  I do have the necessary epoxy type glue that should work to adhere the Velcro strips to the plastic sheets.  Presently, I’m waiting for it to get warmer here so that I can have the windows open while using the toxic-smelling glue.

Rhoda Caroline Richardson Womble Research

I’m still waiting for the copies of the membership records of the Womble family from the Elm Street Methodist Church that I ordered from the Archivist at the Tennessee Conferences Archives, History Depository.  I called them a couple of weeks back to find out what had happened with the copies that were going to be mailed to me.  The woman I spoke with said that the minister told her he probably mailed them to the wrong address.  I gave her my address again and was told that they would be sent to me within a couple of days.  I’m considering that if I don’t receive them in a few days that I’ll send them a SASE asking for the information again, which is probably what I should have done initially, but I wasn’t sure how much 10 pages of information would cost to mail. 

Embroidery/Knitting Projects

What I’ve been doing while waiting for these much anticipated copies is working on Marilyn Leavitt-Imblum’s “Once Upon A Time” that I’m making for one of my sisters.  I had barely started it when I first purchased it back in 1995 and only started dedicating a serious chunk of my time to work on the piece in January 2012.  I’ve been trying to spend most of my weekends stitching and this past week even decided to work on it a bit during the week.

At the same time that I’m cross-stitching this, I’m also knitting a cable knit sweater of which is about a little over halfway done.   One of the knitting blogs I read suggested working on more knitting projects at one time—basically to stop being a knitting monogamist. I considered this and then while spending so much time cross-stitching during this long holiday weekend on the piece for my sister, the idea came to me to take up embroidering more projects at one time. Basically, to stop being an embroidery monogamist!  

I won’t try this though until after my current embroidery project is completely finished!

Reading

I recently finished reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, a book that I’ve always wanted to read.  Another book that I’ve finished reading is While My Pretty One Knits from the Black Sheep Knitting Mysteries series. This seemed to be a better read than the knitting mysteries written by Maggie Sefton, which after reading 2 ½ of them-the third I just couldn’t finish.  I do really like the characters in Maggie’s books, but by the third mystery the story seemed to be too much of a rehash of the first two books in the series.  It was a bit disappointing to me not to finish the third, A Deadly Yarn because the budding romance between the main character and one of the guys on the local softball team interested me, the people in knitting group were great too.  I can see I’m digressing here and will have to post something just about knitting mysteries or craft mysteries in general at a later date.

Avoiding the genealogical sin of getting behind in processing your research

Last year I spent a lot of time and money on my genealogical research.  Now I’ve reached the point where I think many people doing genealogy find themselves--recording it, reading through what’s been collected, and filing it away.  All of this is to process your research findings. 

At times, this is something I’m very good at.  I’ve taught myself that when I’m out researching to write down the full titles and authors of books, microfilm, or whatever I’m looking at so that I can keep track of what I’ve looked at or not.

During 2011 I really got into ordering microfilm at my local Family History Center and now I’m seeing the value of taking more of a hunting and gathering approach to genealogical research.  Tracking down or hunting for records is definitely the most rewarding task for me, but it’s very important to process the documents that you find when you’re out in the world looking at and making photocopies of these documents.  Many times, I’ve found myself so eager to read these documents that I put off processing them properly.

Recording your research findings is crucial in performing genealogical research.  Typically, this involves recording a document or record in your research log, putting the information gleaned into your genealogy program, citing your findings both on the document itself and in your genealogy program, and then filing the document away in the proper file folder.

For me, the system of fully processing a document has come to include transcribing it.  It’s my belief that it’s very important to completely read through the documents that you’ve found.  Sometimes this may involve making a transcription of the record so that you can fully comprehend what the document is saying and its purpose many years ago.

It may seem pointless to transcribe records handwritten documents, but I’ve found this to be especially helpful to me in processing a record that I discovered.  Sometimes I find the handwriting on old documents to be difficult to read, so I’ve taken to transcribing them as a way to make them easier for me to read.  At times, the information in the documents is pretty every day, mundane stuff; however, it does provide a window into the ancestor’s world.  This helps to flesh out the personality of the person, their life, and their environment.  Learning certain things about an ancestor and the area in which they lived could open up new and previously unknown avenues of research that would’ve remained hidden if these so called mundane events hadn’t been transcribed. 

More on Womble Marriage Bonds

After researching more closely what North Carolina marriage bonds are available via the FHL, I knew that these records were next on my Womble research list.  While I was at FGS in Springfield, IL, I was talking with the president of the non-profit that I work for about my research.  I told her how I much I wanted to find a marriage record for John Womble and Catharine Greene in Edgecombe County, North Carolina.  We discussed marriage bonds that are at the state archives in Raleigh and I mentioned that these are available on at the FHL. 

When I returned home from Illinois, I decided to make a trip out to my local Family History Center in Annandale to order the microfiche of these records.  It was a Thursday morning and the place was dead.  I sat at a table filling out the order forms for the records I wanted.  I chatted a bit with the volunteer who was working there about what I wanted.  I had been to this facility many times and they never seemed to have any Edgecombe County, North Carolina records on site.  The gentleman looked up the records; even though, I told him that he probably wouldn't find them.

Surprisingly, he found that they had them there-pretty much the whole slew of North Carolina marriage bonds on microfiche!  I was so bowled over by surprise that I could barely tell him or think which records it was that I needed to look at.  I looked through the records for both brides and grooms, but didn't find one for John Womble marrying Catharine Greene.  I did find bonds for most of their children, which was nice.  I already had gotten those marriage records on a previous trip, but it was good to see these listed.  The records covered the whole state of North Carolina, so it wasn't as though I could just not be looking in the right county or something.  I'm still not sure if this is a record area where I should do further research to see if there's something else available.  Obviously, I should still make a trip to the North Carolina State Library and Archives in the future.

The main lesson to take away from my experience is that just because you always seem to have bad luck at a repository not having what you're looking for doesn't mean that this is necessarily a hard and fast rule.  The funny thing is that I typically never visit that FHC on Thursdays and if I had gone there on another day, I most likely would've paid money to order records that the place had already.  As it was, I was not only there at some time that was abnormal for me and the volunteer actually took the time to ask me about my research.  Sometimes when I've ordered records there the volunteer manning the desk will inquire if I know whether or not they don't have the records onsite.  At times, when I've said yes, they've gone further and looked it up in their system, but there have been those days when they don't.

Don't be discouraged if your research hits a slump and, even though I wasn't really successful in my research that day.  I still feel that I learned from the experience because I learned not only that most likely John Womble's marriage record to Catharine Greene just doesn't exist, but also that just because you believe that a repository doesn't have the records you're looking for doesn't mean they don't have any of the records you need.

Albert Womble Papers

When I visited my parents this past September I went through a box of Womble family memorabilia.  Amongst the odds and ends of various items was a collection of items that I believe belonged to my great grandfather Albert Womble.

I had gone through some of these things before and even made photocopies of them too.  However, on this visit I wanted to take some of Albert’s paper home with me.  I sent aside the items and then asked my parents if I could take them with me.  They agreed to let me take them.

Last month I finally had the time to go through them and try to document my findings as I went.  I didn’t get through all of them because I found it to be a tedious process going through the papers, photographing it, and then writing about it.  It is a start though, and my advice to anyone who attempts this is to have patience and to realize that it’s a slow process. 

Some of the items I took were small pocket-sized memorandum notebooks.   One of these was simply titled Receipt and has written on a page B. I. Complex.  There is a list of tablets and the cost.  My assumption is that Albert was taking B1 complex pills and was trying to calculate the cost of different sized tablets and perhaps which sized tablet would cost the least over a period of time.  Today, I think of B1 complex vitamins as being pretty normal.  I don’t know that much about what certain vitamins are supposed to do, but I’m sure that in the past it was a new fangled thing.  I’ve heard stories that Albert didn’t have much money and so he didn’t eat very nutritious food. 

A single page was found and it looked as though it was torn from a notebook.  Strange phrases are written on this.  I assume that these are song titles.

They’re as follows:

My little Becck a roo

Wagin Westward   [not sure if this should be Wagon Westward]

I can’t give you anything but love

% for 2

Manhatin Seranade [sic]

My blue heaven

Molly and the baby

A letter to Albert Womble from his brother Thomas.  Inside the letter folded up was a listing of radio programs for Thurs. Dec. 30.  I’m not sure of the year, but it must be during WWII because there are some war programs.  It may be from the Knoxville News-Sentinel because it makes reference to the News-Sentinel magazine and there’s a station that has the call letters WNOX.  I think WNOX is a Knoxville radio station.  The backside of the clipping makes reference to that city in various ads.  The year might be 1942 because of the used car ad next to a bunch of Help Wanted ads.  My reasoning is that the ad is pushing ’39, ’40, and ’41 cars.  If these cars are used than the year probably isn’t 1938 or ’43 because it would have ’42 cars listed.  The letter isn’t dated and is very short.  Apparently Thomas Womble suffered from blood poisoning in the past and was very sick.  This might explain previous addresses I’ve seen for him addressed to a hospital in California.  In the letter Tom tells his brother that he’s feeling better and he seems to offer Albert help of he ever is sick or needs money.

There was a folded up article about the death of his oldest son, Joseph who died during an indoor baseball game at the Centralia YMCA.  I had the impression that Albert may have carried that article with him everywhere.

In a partial envelope is a receipt dated 2 June 1941.  It says, received from A. Womble Eight and no dollars June 2 to July 2 $8.00 Mrs. J.P. Welsh.  On the back of this receipt is written: 

6-2. to 7-2-41.

7-2 to 8-2. - 41. –

Mrs. Welsh $8.00. 

8-2 to 9-2 $6.00

Mrs. Welsh

9-2 to 10-2. 6.00

Mrs. Welsh

To me this looks like Albert Womble is paying rent to someone named Mrs. Welsh.  Maybe it's for 303 Madison in Paducah, Kentucky. 

I did some research on Mrs. Welsh and found a listing in the 1941 Paducah City Directory for a Jas. P Welch.  He's living at 323 Madison and his wife's name is Luna.  He is a harness-maker at Ferguson Co.  There is also a listing for a Louisa Welch living a 303 Madison who furnishes rooms.  I think this means that they rent out rooms. These are listed on page 629 of the 1941 Paducah, KY city directory.

In the 1937 Paducah City Directory, Albert Womble is living at 303 Madison and working for the Ferguson Co.  The name J.P. Welsh is written in the address section of one of Albert Womble's memorandum books.  I think these Welch/Welsh people are the same that are mentioned in Albert Womble’s papers.

Torn corner of paper, written in what appears to be my grandmother's handwriting about John Womble and his Rev. War service and some things about his life.  I think this was written after Albert died because it looks like it's written with a ballpoint pen.  In the brief biographical sketch about John Womble it says that her was born in 1756 in NC and died in Edgecombe County, NC in Oct. 1820.  He was married twice and he married and he married his 2nd wife Catherine in 1798.  One of their 11 children according to this was named John Winfield who was Albert's dad.  John Womble had another son named John with his first wife in 1788.  He received a pension from the war and two land grants.

Handmade leather wallet or case that is held together with masking tape.  On the masking tape is written in what looks like my grandmother's handwriting it says Notes and Records of Albert Womble son of John Winfield Womble of Nashville and Hardin Co.  John Winfield Womble was the 12th child of John Womble-Rev. War soldier in N. Carolina who fought [?] at the siege of Savannah & Charleston, captured at Charleston & sent to prison of British after war.  Enlisted in Spring of about 1778-1779.

 Inside wallet is a notebook made of leather that looks handmade.  Notebook seems to contain some sort of Union joining ceremony and bylaws.  Also information about harness making and the construction of other similar leather made devices.

I think that the wallet case and torn corner of paper are the source for Winfield being the mistaken middle name for my great-great grandfather.  Since the handwriting appears to be that of my grandmother, Virginia, I believe that she may be the source of this misinformation.  I’ve seen this mistake in other papers that I’ve gotten from some relatives and my only guess is that they got this wrong information from her.  I’ve never seen anything directly from my great grandfather, Albert, which gives his father’s middle name as Winfield.  It’s always Washington, which is correct. 

My grandmother seemed to know a lot about her dad’s family, but I’m not sure if this is because she was interested in it or had just heard about it from her dad.  Her father, Albert seems somewhat interested in his heritage because I saw something written in one of his notepads about having an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War.  Maybe he had only heard about it from his sister, Maude, but otherwise wasn’t too interested in it much.  Perhaps he actually had more pressing things to think about other than genealogy?  Such as basic survival in the world, I got the impression that Albert Womble didn’t have much money and at times, or quite possibly his lack of funds was a frequent occurrence.  Based on one letter I read when I was visiting my parents, his son Ben mentions sending his dad a money order so that he can pay a pharmacy bill.  From the tone, it sounds as if Albert’s children often send money to their dad to help him make ends meet. 

My experience has shown me that children sometimes tend to internalize aspects of their parents’ personality or their home environment growing up.  I’ve heard that my grandmother tended to be preoccupied about money.  If this really was a personality trait of hers, it’s possible that it comes from her father’s own preoccupation with money that I’ve seen evidenced in his papers.  Other stories I’ve heard have mentioned that Albert’s family didn’t have much money.  Sometimes people who don’t have money growing up become fixated on this or any other item that they believe was lacking in their childhood.  My grandmother’s alleged monetary quirk may have been also because she witnessed her own parent’s money troubles and so became concerned that she may face the same issues down the road.

I think that’s enough psychoanalysis for one blog posting, but it is interesting to hear these family stories and then try to piece together what motivated certain a ancestor's actions or personality traits.

Mound Cemetery Visit

Previously, I posted about wanting to visit an Illinois cemetery where many members of the Yockey family are buried.  Prior research had shown that many of my husband’s ancestors are buried in Mound Cemetery near Hunt City, Illinois.  I had also used the internet to determine the exact location of this cemetery, which was just south of Hunt City in Jasper County.  I visited this cemetery while visiting Illinois this past September.  On Ancestry, I had even found a picture of his grandparents’ headstone.  This picture gave me an idea of what I would need to look for once I got there.

Unfortunately I had a cold when I began my Illinois vacation, but I was determined not to let this stop me from doing the research that I had planned.  Before traveling to Illinois, I had done a GoogleMap search for driving directions to Mound Cemetery.  After looking up where Hunt City was on a road atlas, I calculated that it would take about 2 hours to get there by car.

My husband and I mentioned our planned visit to the cemetery to my husband’s mother and she told us that she had taken photos of many of the graves in that cemetery a few years ago and had put them in an album.  With her permission we borrowed the album for the trip.  I studied it beforehand and found more pictures of graves that belonged to my husband’s ancestors.  The one grave that I was very interested to find was for John M. Yockey and his wife Emily Riley.  I didn’t see that in the album my mother-in-law had made.

On Tuesday September 12^th in the early afternoon before starting out, I packed up my sleuthing kit, which included a camera, directions to the cemetery, the photo album, and because of my cold-a couple of packs of tissues.  I had never been to this part of Illinois and was surprised by the hills and numerous trees that encompassed the landscape, as we got closer.  When we were more in the vicinity, the trees became less numerous and gave way to a rolling prairie of cornfields and a lone pumpkin patch.

We followed the directions that I had printed out, but by this time we were both in need of a rest stop and unfortunately there wasn’t one to be found.  The directions seemed to be wrong, but it seemed as if we should have been in the general area of the cemetery.  We decided that we needed to take a break and headed into the nearest town, Newton to use the restrooms and eat a late lunch.

Over our lunch we reviewed the directions and the road atlas.  The only conclusion that we could come to was that the directional street names (North, East, etc.) were wrong.  We started back out on the road and headed back to the same area that had given us problems earlier.

This time when we came to what should have been listed as E 2100^th St. in the directions, but according to Google was N 2100^th St. there was a sign that said Mound Church and Cemetery, Burl Ives gravesite and memorial.  I knew that Burl Ives was buried in Mound Cemetery before heading out, but didn’t imagine that there would be a sign about it nearby.  I think that our distraction over needing a restroom contributed to our not noticing this sign on our previous visit.

We turned onto the road and over the next ridge was a church, but no cemetery nearby.  My husband felt that this might be the area where the cemetery was, but I didn’t think so because the name on the church didn’t say it was Mound Church.  I pointed this out to him and he drove down a road that we had passed on our way to this church.  Again, over the next ridge was a church and this one had a cemetery.  In fact, it was the Mound Church and Cemetery.

We parked in the gravel driveway.  I grabbed the camera and we went in.  The cemetery was pretty much surrounded on three sides by cornfields.  I walked around with my camera and spotted the gravesite and memorial of Burl Ives almost immediately.  My mother-in-law had helped me to draw a map of where my husband’s grandparents’ (Courtland M. and Nora R. Yockey) grave was located in relation to the church and Burl Ives’ grave. I was able to find their grave and took a picture of it.  I tried to locate other graves, but went back to the car to get the photo album my mother-in-law had made to try to find the others I was looking for.

Using the photo album and wandering around the cemetery I was able to find my husband’s great grandparents’ (Jasper and Zona Yockey) grave.  I took a picture of that but was still missing my father-in-law’s younger brother, who died as a baby and my John M. and Emily R. Yockey’s grave. 

By looking at the pictures in the album I was able to determine that my father-in-law’s brother was buried next a large square topped stone.  Near this stone was a tree.  I realized that the tree in the photo might not be there now.  My husband had now joined me in my search for these graves.  He agreed with my suspicions about the tree.

We were standing a few rows away from the church and propane tanks which were behind it.  Off in the distance I saw what could be the tree stump we were looking for.  As we walked toward it, I found what might be the two headstones I was looking for. 

The grave for my father-in-law’s baby brother was now tilted slightly on earth that had bubbled up slightly.  Possibly this was due to the tree being removed?  Next to this grave was the grave for my husband’s great-great grandparents, John M. and Emily R. Yockey.  The stone was nearly illegible because the engraving on it had eroded most of what written away.

I took photos of both headstones.  My husband came up with the idea to shoot a video of how to get to these gravesites.  We started at the entrance gates to the cemetery and my husband made a video of me talking and leading the viewer through the cemetery to the graves of Richard Yockey (my father-in-law’s brother) and John M. and Emily R. Yockey.

Patience is virtue especially in genealogical research

Back on the 2nd of this month I ordered two rolls of microfilm from my local Family History Center.  I was told to contact them in about 10 days to see if they had arrived.  It's looking like this will take more like three weeks!  One of the most important things to keep in mind when doing genealogical research is that there's virtually no instant gratification.  If that's what you're looking for while tracing your family lines, find another hobby!

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.

Social Networking for Genealogists

Just finished reading Social Networking for Genealogists by Drew Smith.  I've been doing genealogical research off and on since moving to the DC metro area in the 1990's.  I've posted some messages to genealogy newsgroups with very little results but haven't let this discourage me from my research.

A couple of weeks ago I finally subscribed to Rootsweb's Womble mail list, which based on the few posts I've received isn't very active.  While reading Drew Smith's book I was trying to decide the best way to put my genealogical research and knowledge out to the public.  I thought about just making a website on the family I'm currently researching.  Considered forming a Womble group on Facebook, but realized I would only reach those people that are all ready on Facebook.

This seemed to be the best solution and unfortunately I can't promise that my postings will only be on genealogy or my research.  My plan is to have a website for the Womble family that will include the research I've done on them along with photos and sources this will eventually be linked to this blog hopefully one day in the future.