I remember

I never liked the World Trade Center towers. They were built while I was growing up outside New York City. They were out of scale with the rest of the Manhattan skyline, dwarfing the skyline of my childhood where the Empire State building reigned.

But these last ten years, all I can see when I look at that skyline is the spot where they stood. And I wish so very much that they and all those who perished that day were still standing.




Photograph by Jeffmock (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Abstract thoughts

I've relied for many years on published abstracts of wills, marriages and deeds in my research. I don't live anywhere near the places I've needed to research and it's only in the last few years that original documents have become more available online. As I worked through the thousands of names in the family trees I inherited, validating the information and adding rudimentary sources, the abstracts were heaven sent.

I'm now in Virginia - ground zero for much of my family and my husband's. I'm visiting houses, cousins, graveyards and my personal Mecca, the Library of Virginia. Four days there doesn't seem nearly enough time, but I shall make the most of it. 

Saturday I plowed through Lancaster and Northumberland records, looking for the wills I've been citing, looking for estate settlements, inventories, other deeds and indentures. And I found them. Dozens and dozens of them. I haven't dared count how many pages I'm going to copy to my flash drive on Monday.  

And I saw what I'd known in the abstract - the names that are missing from those lovely, easy abstracts. There are dozens and dozens of them, as well. Names like Sam, 42 year old male. Annie, 16 year old female. Stepto, 27 year old male. (These aren't specific people - just examples.) I looked away several times. I was more exhausted than I've been the entire trip. I can't possible copy them all. But I will copy everyone of "ours" that I can get to. And over the next months I will transcribe every name and publish them all. 

In the meantime, if you're seeking enslaved ancestors from the Northern Neck and believe they might have been owned by the following families please contact me after August 1st. I'll be glad to send you copies of anything I've found. 

Slave Owners naming Slaves in 18th & 19th c. Northern Neck Records

Corbin

Currell

Gibson

Lawson

Lee

McTyre

Meredith

Palmer

Yerby

These other families may also have left records naming slaves, but I have not seen them so far. I will, however, be copying records so may have information on them later.

Conway (Northern Virginia)

Dobyns (Northern Virginia)

Doggett (Northern Virginia)

Holt (Amelia and Campbell Counties)

James (Wythe and Smyth Counties)

Mason (Campbell County)

Porter (Fauquier County)

Turner (Northern Virginia)

Williams (Wythe, Grayson, Smyth Counties)

Our Places - Those Places Thursday

It has been a difficult week in Missouri. Even from across the state we've felt the waves of sorrow and pain radiating from Joplin. We've watched the skies all week, heard more sirens and prayed that no more lives would be lost.

I've thought of places. Places we've lived, places we've loved, places our families called home, places our families left - even fled. I've thought of what defines those places.

The lighthouse reaching out into our great lake or standing atop the rocky coast of our cape. The spires of colonial churches rising above the town. The brick townhomes. The clapboard farmhouses. Cherry blossoms, blue hydrangeas, daylilies. The ice cream stands we walked to after dinner - or our much loved St. Louis custard which requires a car trip. The cannons on beach still pointing out to the sound, still defending our shores more than 200 years after the minutemen raced down from their farms. The stone walls of Connecticut, the white fences of Cape Cod. A baseball stadium. A giant boulder left by a retreating glacier. A massive tree, up the path, with a rope swing waiting each summer. The drawbridges. The porches. The rivers running through the cities, towns and villages where we've lived. The mountains defining the views, the roads, even the lives. The sand dunes and grasses.

Some of these things will stand for centuries. Most will not.

Starina, the village where my great-grandmother was born, lies beneath the Starina Reservoir in Slovakia. A deliberate destruction for a presumed greater good. Some of the lands my family roamed in Tennessee lie beneath the Tennessee Valley Authority reservoirs. Rust belt and mill cities that sheltered my immigrant family have decayed, no longer industrial power houses. Tiny farm communities in the midwest have vanished, with only an old house, a barn, a silo marking where our ancestors lived and worked. Even those places that flourish have grown - often beyond recognition.

Such melancholy. Nothing is static. But I pray no more of our communities are blown to pieces this year.