I will need to come back to this post and fill in more details, but I wanted to put a placeholder here to remind myself to discuss this project.
I volunteered, full-time, from October through December (2017). I spearheaded the effort to take the Carroll County Genealogical Society's holdings (books, journals, maps, etc) and inventory, catalog and publish the findings online. The project was a success and after months of data entry - the library webpage has been officially released to the public. More info on this project later.
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I am starting a book! I have always wanted to write a book, and today I have taken the first steps to do that. Well, technically my research has been the first step, but today I took a step closer to making my dream, of being an author, a reality. I purchased software/ an application that will help me to print family reports, check facts and gather statistics and charts for the book. I am very excited! Also, I am a bit overwhelmed with the inconsistencies in my tree. I have been doing genealogical research for over 20 years, and expect some inconsistencies with the way I entered information- but not this many! ha.
I have decided to focus on Cornelius Bond's family and his descendants for my book. He was married twice. At this stage I am not sure what information I will include on his first wife, yet. I am very excited to learn more about Hannah Frances Englar Bond, his second wife, and my Great Great Great Grandmother. I am not going to give myself timelines. I feel it would stress me out too much. I am instead going to focus on the research and the people. I will try to devote certain days to certain individuals. Cornelius fathered 19 children (that I have found, unsure if there were miscarriages or early deaths) and there is therefore a lot of information to double check and research. I want to try to find birth records (might not be any), death records (more likely a reality), marriage records (not everyone married though), newspaper clippings (records are not digitized), church records (unknown what church they went to at this time), and land records (Red Level is identified as the farm Hannah lived on). So much to do! I better stop gabbing here and get to it! In my online search for possible causes of the Grimes family deaths in 1862-1863 (5 children under 10), I found an article titled "The Most Dangerous Epidemics in U.S. History (http://www.healthline.com/health/worst-disease-outbreakshistory#overview1). Based on this preliminary information I am going to look into Cholera (which came in three waves, between 1832 and 1866) and Scarlet fever (which also came in waves, but started in 1858) further.
I need to look at newspapers of the time (unsure of what was around) and see if there are any articles on this devastating tragedy. Also, death records of the time and area. Since my little trip to the city (NYC) I have been wanting to find an item I saw in a museum. It helped to identify a spot on a meteor, without hurting the rock, or marring it in any noticeable way. It was a thin piece of wire with a circle at the end; the circle was coated in a yellow plastic (see previous post for image). It looked like a thin wire bubble wand, basically.
After searching online at various museum supply companies, I could not find what I wanted. So, today I went out and bought some 16 gauge wire, pliers, and liquid dip. I wrapped the wire around a piece of PVC pipe I had laying around from a different project (the PS VR headset stand). The PVC made a perfect circle 1" in diameter on one end, and a Sharpie marker (for an oblong shape) and a round knife sharpener (for a smaller circle) on the opposite end of the wire. The wands came out ok, but how well will it hold up? I wonder if I should have gotten a heavier gauge wire? Need to field test this before I make enough to give out. I want to give one to my cousin who loves genealogy as much as I do. Oh- the Plasti Dip I bought ended up being black (even though the picture was yellow on the can and the guy at Lowes said they only had yellow in stock). Well, that won't work on this black coated wire. Ha. So, now I need to find and order some yellow PD online. We spent a couple days in New York City for my birthday. I wanted to see a planetarium show and Kristopher had never experienced one. We saw Dark Universe, which was narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It was a new space show in the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. The film projected across the 67 foot wide hemispheric dome and allowed us to 'travel' through space, different galaxies, to billions of light years away. It was very different than the star shows I gazed in wonder at in the Ward Beecher Planetarium at Youngstown State University. Those Ward Beecher Planetarium shows were off of a single Spitz star projector which seemed like a plastic ball that simply projected pin pricks of light out of it, and spun around to show different views of the night sky during the year. Even those (now low-tech) shows blew my mind and amazed me as a little girl. It was no wonder, then, that I throughly enjoyed the $54 Dark Universe show (price of museum admissions and 2 tickets to the show). The best thing that occurred from that trip to the American Museum of Natural History, however, occurred in the Ross Hall of Meteorites and Guggenheim Hall of Minerals. To be honest, I had no intention of going to those halls. They were on the other side of the museum and were hard to find, frankly. I didn't want to walk all the way there as my feet were already killing me from the 19,000 + steps we took that day. But Kris wanted to go there and it was the only thing he admitted to have interest in, so we went and I only grumbled about it in my head (not out loud). It was there that we came upon some mice running around ramped and this specimen- a fragment of a larger meteorite that landed on earth. The wire bubble wand (no clue what it's official name is) identifies a piece of matter in the rock that is slightly darker in color and the display identified that the matter is foreign and doesn't contain any iron (something unusual to find in a meteor). I don't recall all of what the little plaque said (and I didn't take a pic of it). The fact that this bubble wand unobtrusively identified an area on a flat 2D plain was what held my fascination. I have a scrapbook/photo album of my Great Grandmother - Italy M. Bond Grimes. I have studied the pictures so much that I know my Great Grandmother's face and can pick her out in even the blurriest photos. However, her granddaughter, my mother, cannot tell the difference at all. I have been wondering what unobtrusive method I can use to effectively 'tag' (a Facebook term which here means identify) people in the pictures, so that future generations will be able to know who the known people are. Well- this bubble wand would do nicely to identify people!
My plan is to get some 16 or 18 gauge wire and manipulate it into a wand with a circle at each end, a smaller one the size of a dime and a bigger one the size of a quarter. I could make a couple wands to identify multiple people at the same time, too. I wonder what I can use to coat the circular end..? I wonder if any coatings come in different colors. I could use different color coatings to identify different people- "The blue circle identifies Fred, red circle identifies Bill, etc". When I was younger, at camp we recycled old telephone wire (from downed lines) into bracelets. It would be nice to have that, as it was colorful and free, however it was not very sturdy and easily bent. I am going to look for Plasti-Dip, it is a rubber coating for metal objects. Shouldn't be too hard to find it in the hardware stores around here. I will take pics and let you know how this little "picture wand" project goes! |
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