Random musings...

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:57:01 GMT

I started this blog to share - photos, memories, documents, places and people - with other people.

Freely sharing was important to me because of the sharing of information I experienced in the early years of this journey when I asked for information.

On surname message boards. Hard to believe, but I still find posts of my own from 1999 on some of those boards.

Distant cousins found the blog in Google searches. I correspond with several of them still. All the other bloggers were right.

If you build it, they will come.

In the last few months, I've started getting emails that go something like this:
I am making sure that this e-mail doesn't bounce. I am researching a possible family connection in Arkansas. (That's the actual text of a message I found in my inbox this morning.)

I always reply to those, to let them know the email address is still good. Sometimes, there is a distant family connection.

Sometimes, people have seen how Arkansas-intensive my tracks are on the internet, and they just need help with their own trees.

What can I say? I'm a Scorpio, and always intrigued by a mystery.

Even when it doesn't have one of my own surnames on it.

You know how people say that they hope they don't find out they unwittingly married their own cousin?

I've always figured that somewhere downline - closer to my generation - I'd find out someone was a cousin of their spouse.

I decided last week to start looking at my nephews' and niece's families on the *other* sides of their families.

I started with my niece. Her father's surname is Rankin.

Started with her dad and went backward.

After about 3 hours, I sat here grinning like a fool.

Her dad is my 4th cousin, twice removed. The connection starts in 1877, when John James Rankin married Margaret Ann Lemley in Pope County.

Margaret Ann was the daughter of Ephraim Lemley, Jr. and Cynthia Elvira Burris.

So my niece is also my 4th cousin, three times removed.

Of course, I didn't stop with the pedigree.

I'm looking for bits and pieces of information that give the third dimension to the names, dates and places.

Turns out the Rankins (and their allied families) were quite the movers and shakers in Perry County, AR.

And some of its earliest settlers.

The Rankin family will have blog posts of its own.

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Familysearch brought an unpleasant surprise...

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 20:25:15 GMT

I use Familysearch a lot for Texas death records.

I was doing some work on a neglected leg of my Burris bunch - and found a death record for my second cousin, once removed.

Effie Estelle Rankin was the daughter of William Wilson Rankin and Mary Jane Jones.

She was an old maid schoolteacher, and died at the age of 74, eight days after her birthday in 1962 in Collingsworth County, TX.

When I look at death certificates for someone that old, I expect to see death by heart attack, cancer or stroke.

Not because the car you were riding in pulled out in front of a train, and death was caused by a fractured skull and broken neck.

I haven't been able to find a newspaper article to find out if she was driving or was a passenger.

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Shakin' the Family Tree

Random musings...

Familysearch brought an unpleasant surprise...