Quaker's and I'm not talking Oats

I wanted to talk about what I learned this week. This is a starter blog on the topic of Quaker's and Religion in my Family Tree.  After getting a new Hint in my Ancestry DNA I got to looking at an older branch of the Stitt line.  The line was the Mills which joined the Stitt line back in the late 1800's. Something I had not really looked at in my family research before was their religious beliefs.  

The interesting thing wasn't the two families coming together it was how they eventually ran into each other.   From what I have researched so far was that the Stitt's came from PA to KY to OH and eventually to IA.  The Mills side came from PA to NC to TN to IA over the same approximate time frame.  Both of the families often traveled in groups when they made their big moves.  The Mills were Quakers and had a prominent impact in TN Quaker history.  Before I continue on and in case you are new to what Quakers are here was a useful piece for me.

Quakers are often confused with the Amish or with Shakers, two independent groups with whom there is no direct historical or theological connection. Despite a shared concern for peace and a historic emphasis on simplicity, Quakers are a unique body of Christians, formally called the Society of Friends.
Friends do not withdraw from the world into private celibate communities, as did the Shakers to the point of extinction. Nor do Quakers isolate themselves from the modern world, indicating their uniqueness by the wearing of unusual clothing and by rejecting technology as do the Amish. Instead, Quakers are a diverse group of Christian believers who seek to maintain a personal relationship with God while remaining active participants in the world around them.

Like I said earlier it looks like most of the family moves where with religiously like minded friends "no pun intended."  And after about a century of moving around they all showed up in IA.

I am going to leave you with that for now, however another thing I learned about the Quakers is they took good notes at their meetings keeping things like vital statistics (births, deaths, marriages, changes in membership.)  There are multiple volumes of meeting minutes from all the states involved  that I plan on checking out.  So look for future blogs with Quakers in the title and I will share new discoveries as I find them.

Serendipity

Ok, let me get a few things out before I get you my main post.   Sorry for not writing last week, I was out of town and before I knew it I had forgot.  Last thing is this blog is Genealogy by Eric.  It's just my opinion of what I have seen, heard, and found.  If you see something I have misinterpreted please feel free to comment below or you can email me personally at stitt.eric@gmail.com

Now that I've got that out of the way lets get to my post.  My blog today is about accidentally finding something good or useful while not specifically searching for it, Serendipity.  My most recent serendipity moment was with my wife Kathy.  I don't do much research on Kathy's side, not that I don't want to, I just want her involved with it.  I asked her a few weeks ago to help me with some of my tree organization.  Its always easiest to talk to someone about people they know so we were in the Thompson tree.  For those who don't know, Kathy's mother, Mary is a Thompson.

So now that you know which branch I am going down let me throw this one at you.  The Thompson's weren't always Thompson's, they use to be Lennox and that's where I am going to take you.   The Thompson name in this family is only about 5 generations old and starts with John David Thompson/Lennox, Kathy's Great Great Grandfather.

Here is the story as I know it.  Sometime between 1862-1870 John's parents William and Martha Lennox died. It is thought that a Dr Thompson was the last care giver of William and Martha and by the 1870 census a Bridget Thompson was the head of house for both John and Eliza Lennox.  Ten years later John had taken the last name of Thompson as his own.  Then sometime after 1900 John dies and from what I know was lost.  From what was left of family memory he died some where north of St Joseph, MO.

Serendipity you might ask.  Well while I was talking with Kathy about my tree organization I was checking one of my favorite sites. www.findagrave.com it's one of the thing I'm trying to get a hold of is collecting and linking each family member with their find a grave memorial.  Well on that day I got a hit for John David Thompson my serendipity moment.  Thanks to a Russ C who had built a memorial for John not only did I get a death date but a location of where John's last resting pace is.  However John David Thompson are all pretty common names so I wanted to did a little deeper to verify that I found the right guy.

So after one day of Serendipity on find a grave I was able to continue my luck with "The Holt County Sentinel" on the Library of Congress website.  I knew the approximate death date and location from the headstone and with help that the Library of Congress had each of the pages of the sentinel in PDF format.  This allowed me to name search each page, an hour later I found what I was looking for "A Sad Accident"  I'm not going to transcribe the accident, I want you to discover it like I did.  I will say its in the bottom right side of the paper.

Hope you enjoy my serendipity moment and I will talk to you all next week.

A Picture is worth 1000 words.

They say a Picture is worth a thousand words so I thought I would wrap up this introduction of how I got into researching my family history with photos of the tombstones have found.  I have tried to add photos of oldest tombstones found out of the main lines I have researched.  There are a few others that I've included just because I like how they look.  



Robert Moore

oldest tombstone
 of the Moore Family

Frank Short
Woodmen of the World
tombstone



 

Thomas Stitt
oldest tombstone

of the Stitt Family 

 

John Bailey
oldest tombstone
of the Bailey Family





David Hott
oldest tombstone
of the Hott Family

 

John Thompson
oldest tombstone of the
Thompson/Lennox Family





Sarg Nathaniel Sutlief
Oldest tombstone I have found period.
I haven't seen this one personally get but its on my list.

You can click on any of the photos to see a bigger copy of the images.

In The Beginning, Why I'm Even Doing This? Part II

So last time I was telling you how I got started into genealogy because of a forgotten cemetery in my neighborhood.  Over the last 4 years I am made an attempt to find and document where the last resting place is for all my family.

Below is just a small shot of what I have mapped out so far.  Each place marker is a GPS marker of where the tombstone is, with some margin of error.  I couldn't get my Google Earth Embeder to work but I will keep working on it and maybe in a future post you can see an interactive map to explore.  If anyone would like a copy of my Google Earth file, post here or email me and I will send it to you.  I have links to each FindAGrave memorial in the placemarkers.  The cool thing about that is while you might not be up for a road trip to a cemetery, you can still visit the memorial via the web.

These are just the people and cemeteries I have personally visited.  There are about 40 other cemeteries that I haven't visited that are outside of a day's drive.  Its neat seeing all of the cemeteries that I need to visit as most of them start on the east coast and end in MO.  When you look at the whole thing you can see the migration path that the family took to get here. 

I will put something out closer to Memorial Day but if there are any family members who would like a map or if you see someone who I have missed, let me know.  Please feel free to send me your pictures, it lets me see how the stones are aging.

Cousin Bait (In The Beginning, Why I'm Even Doing This?)

Guess if I am going to start blogging and especially about Genealogy I should start of with explaining my beginnings into the genealogy world.  Its all started about 4 years ago while out for a walk in the neighborhood, my wife Kathy got stopped and asked about a cemetery in the area from some random stranger.  Neither of us knew about it but just a couple of doors down there was a cemetery, the Roberts Cemetery.  We immediately went to find it.  On our way back we stopped by our neighbor who had been in the neighborhood since the houses were build back in the 1960's.  After talking with her and a few other neighbors we found out that what we had found was only about half of the original cemetery.  The builder of our neighborhood tried to buy the property but was unsuccessful because of the cemetery.  However just a few short years later a new builder came into the area who was going to build apartments for section 8 housing, the North Brighton Townhomes.  For what ever reason they where either able to skip past the red tape of buying the cemetery or just completely neglect that there was one there all together.  This lead to the cemetery being bull dowsed over, before the cemetery was completely wiped from the face of the earth the neighbors stopped the construction.  To mend their mistakes the construction company picked up and laid all the tombstones in concrete, face up.  Now after already surviving some 100 years the cemetery faced its next big struggle.  Normal tombstones are standing upright which protects a lot of the stones from the weather.  After 50 years of being in concrete the elements are greatly taking their toll.  Snow, ice, dirt and wind are slowly erasing the names, dates and last loving words.  Even if you look at the photos of the Roberts Cemetery which where taken in 2008 and then look at the stones now you can see a big difference.

This all lead me to my big question.  Where is my family?  Where are they buried?  Is anyone taking care of them or have they been bull dowsed over and forgotten?  My father's parents have already passed, but both of my mother's parents are still alive.  What do they know and what may be lost if something where to happen to them?  

Our home owners association just got reactivated and is starting to have regular meeting.  I have plans to bring up the Roberts Cemetery and hopefully get the neighborhood or a local boy scout troop to adopt the cemetery to help clean and preserve this little piece of history.  

I am going to leave you with this for now.  Next time I will try to share with you how I solved these questions and where I am going from here.  If you are ever in Kansas City ask me about the cemetery and I can take you to see it. 

Roberts Cemetery  http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&GScid=2251323&GRid=27524449&CRid=2251323&

New Year, New Topics

Ok I am going to try to do a new resolution this year and keep this blog going.  So to do this and keep it going I am going to use this thread to keep Idea's of topics.  If you think of something feel free to let me know and we can add it to the list.


First that is coming to mind.

• Clyde Short and the USS Savo Island.

Latest update

Ok ok. So I’m not very good at this whole blogger thing. I just don’t make time to reflect and write what’s going on.

That being said here's what’s going on in my Genealogy world.

Two weeks ago I got my request back from the AF Archives. A few weeks early mind you. It was like Christmas. Kathy text me a pic of the package while I was at the Community Blood Center, donating blood. When I finished I drove home as fast I could, I was so excited. I received two CD's and after popping them in the computer I found out what I had in store for me. 4000+ Pages of PDF from the 92 Bombardment Group. It took some time to break it down but eventually I got it down to Months and then even further to Narration, Operational Reports, Publications, Crew Lists, and then Appendix.

WOW was there a lot of info. I first had to go find the 407th and specifically Merl on each crew list. Then I took that and had to match the crew list with the Operational Reports. This took almost a week working on it whenever I could usually a couple of hours at a time.

All in all I found out he flew on 31 Combat missions and flying on 17+ different aircraft (some AC I couldn’t figure out the tail number).

I have plotted all the mission targets on Google Earth. Most were just listed as the town bombed so not 21st Century accuracy but still impressive when you look at.

My next step is to work on getting these all time stamped. Hopefully I can figure out the spreadsheet work around to make it smother.

We'll see.

Eric Stitt