Very little fanfare was given in the US, in fact I don't recall it being mentioned...Britian's last living veteran of World War One, Harry Patch, passed away a couple of weeks ago. He was 111 years old. According to the article in the LA Times, he never spoke of his service until he was a hundred years old. He was young when he went in and devastated at the loss of three men in his team when a shell exploded above them in September of 1917 at the battle of Passchendaele. The battle lasted three months costing half a million men. He was wounded himself, in the groin, by flying schrapnel and had to be held down by 4 men holding his limbs,  while the medic removed it....without anesthetic. At the end of the three months, the English had won....they gained FIVE miles.

In our country we save all our hero worship for our World War Two vets and talk very little of the first war, the War to end all wars. I know very little about it. As much research as I have done, I have very few veterans of this war in any of my branches. I don't know why, I have their registration cards, but few ever served.

England was not so lucky....nearly every family lost someone. An entire generation of their young men were lost. Much like our War Between the States and it's effect on men in the South.

I am posting a link to the Times article. I would love it if anyone on here has any stories or pictures of their vets from WWI. These men deserve as much honor and memory as we give any soldier.

www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britain-funeral7-2009aug07,0,995903.story

I am parking this here so that if someone comes back later and claims my research or pitches a fit...which is GOING to happen....I will have proof of when I did it.

For more years (20) than I want to think I have been trying to prove or disprove a relationship with Francis Marion Tolbert/Talbert. "they" have always said he was the person living with Sarah Tolbert in 1850 and 1860 even tho the 1880 census has his mother "Isabella" of SC living with him in Alabama. He applied for a Civil War pension in Alabama and from all I can tell recieved it, claiming he was wounded in the Battle of Atlanta. His records say he served with the 42nd GA Infantry, Co. E out of Newton County. I have checked every war record I could find both on microfilm and Footnote and Ancestry and you name it. He does not show. Period.

Finally tonite I thought I would give it one more shot and see if I could find someone who might possibly be him....so I pulled the entire 42nd GA ...all companies and went thru over 2,000 names. The only thing I found was a GFM Tarbutton. I thought...what the heck....went to Footnote and pulled the cards and guess what.....Gen. Franics Marion Tarbutton...private. And NO there is no mistake about the name. But just to be sure I checked census records for Georgia in 1860 and 70. In 1860 he is listed as a female...but same name and lives with his mother Isabella in Pickens County. In 1870 he lives near his mother, but with his wife Eliza (correct name for wife) and son William E. (also correct name and age) in Fayette County. I have now checked marriage licenses and there is one in Newton County for francis Marion Tarbutton and Sarah J E Mitchell (correct maiden name) in 1864.

His Civil war record shows he deserted and took the oath. I don't know when he changed his name, but by the time he moved to Alabama he had done so and claimed to have been wounded...there is no evidence of that and I don't know WHY he changed his name. Maybe Alabama's rules for CSA pensions were not as stiff as Georgias. He evidently did not have to have witnesses. And in the records I found he claimed to be with a couple of different companies. So who knows.....

BUT I PROVED he is not Sarah Tolberts son and that is good enuff for me. AND his mother changed her name as well?????

I am happy enuff to explode. Now I just have to put this in a couple of places to back up my research.

Doctors at a medical convention at the University of Georgia were called to the home of Herman and Irene Bowden to meet with the woman there who had just finished an 11 month pregnancy and given birth to a 17 pound daughter with two shiny new teeth. The daughter? Helan Carle Bowden. No one knows why Adele Thrasher Bowden decided to spell the “Helan” so differently, but to the end of her life Helan would say…that’s Helan  with an “a” not an “e”. The “Carle” was for her father Carl Micajah Bowden.  After such a nightmare pregnancy and birth,  Adele knew she would have no more children, so this one would be given the boy’s name they had chosen.

The family moved to Atlanta for a short time and when the Depression did not seem to be lessening they moved back to Clarke county to be near family. Mother told many stories of growing up in the country, just across the cotton field from the man who would eventually be her husband. He made the major error of making fun of her on the school bus when she was in the first grade, by telling everyone that Helan Bowden wore her sashes too high. His obvious lack of fashion sense did not keep she and his sister, Lois, from being close friends. Nor did it keep he and his brother and a few other relatives from being gentlemanly in allowing Helan and Lois to go up the ladder first when they chose to jump off the chicken house roof. Neither girl was foolish enough to allow this opportunity for a free peek.

Mama was always so proud that she was given the main roll in the school play in the first grade because she was the only female student who could memorize three pages of dialogue….at six.

My childhood was filled with stories of her childhood. I can probably repeat most of them as completely as she did. I heard stories of them bringing water  from the creek to the house to heat for washing. There had been an old Indian camping place near that creek, Carl once brought her a stone ax, with half the handle and the head held on by rotting leather ties. Many years later it was examined by archeologists who proclaimed it to be much older than the Cherokee or Creek. They seemed to think possibly the Indians themselves had found it somewhere and used it for their own purposes. It sat on the bookcase in Mother’s house until just weeks before she passed away.

When she reached 13 the family moved into Athens, Georgia. Shortly after World War Two began and continued until she graduated on D-Day.  Needless to say most of her dates were with service men, especially those at the Naval Pre-Flight  School.  She learned to love flying and would take any chance to go up with one of the pilots.

Her next favorite passion was the movies…..she saw every single one that came out during the war years, and kept up with as many as she could after that. We always laughed that if we wanted to know any single fact about any Movie star, mama was the one to call. That was true until the very last.

Her passion for reading was unmatched by any soul I ever knew. And she retained all of it…everything she ever read. She worked as a court reporter and as a secretary in the office of John Barrow, who later became a rather well known judge in Athens. He hired her because he said she was one of the most well spoken applicants he had ever had. She always said there was no excuse to ever stop learning. Mama believed in educating yourself. It was her passion.

Helan always said she thought she looked like a Russian peasant. We thought she looked like Donna Reed. And Daddy looked like Andy Griffith. We thought we had the perfect pair.

When Aubrey Tolbert came home from the war he saw her walking down the street with a friend. He asked the man he was with who the pretty girl was. His friend, surprised he didn’t recognize a woman he had grown up with, told him ..that’s Helan Bowden. Daddy said “ THAT’s the woman I’m going to marry.” It took him a bit longer to convince her….he was a bit of a rake. But eventually he did and they stayed together until Daddy passed away three years ago 59 years. Mama gave up then. She said her work was done, and she began to fail.  A little over a month short of two years she joined him, leaving us with wonderful memories of her playfulness and her love of family. She always said she never really knew what she was doing as a parent, but she sure put on a good act. Maybe it was all those years of movies.

Do you get frustrated trying to get information from older family members?. We will cover the younger ones at another time.

I learned the hard way you cannot ask general questions and get satisfactory answers. You have to be somewhat specific and then let their minds wander. Questions like...."what did you do when you were a kid for fun"" just do not get much in the way of answers. Oh they will say something like...oh we played or fished or went hunting or what ever, but you will get a more satisfactory answer if you ask...Did you ever go to the beach when you were little?. How old were you the first time?. Where did you stay?. Did you catch lightening bugs or play tag after dark? Did they have Vacation Bible School? Did they have covered dish dinners at church? Who kept up the graves where your family was buried.? Did your grandmother make anything you especially loved to eat.? Did you have a garden? Did you have running water? If not who hauled the water and where did they bring it from?

A few years ago I had to call an older family member whom I had not seen in years. In the process of the conversation I mentioned a recent family reunion and asked if they ever went to anything like that when she was young. She said no, they all lived near each other and saw one another all the time.  I remarked that was a shame as that is when you get the best food and fun. She said they did have get togetherswith neighbors and family and made ice cream. We talked on our family's passion for ice cream a bit and then she said she remembered going to my grandparents house and they would have a huge wash tub full of ice. They would mix the ice cream in a small tin lunch bucket (which was what kids carried their lunch to school in) and the men would take turns holding the bucket by the handle down in the wash tub and turning it back and forth til the ice cream froze.

Isn't that the coolest thing? I just sort of figured ice cream freezers had been around for ever. What person my age doesn't recall freezing their rear off sitting on a pile of newspapers and a towel on top of a freezer while someone turned the crank. I bet Daddy did think that was a wonderful invention if he had been having to take a turn at holding and twisting a bucket handle.

Anyway...it is always thru the off- the- wall questions you get the best info. Ask Shannon about her other grandmother and her dates with someone other than her grandfather. I forget what question Shannon asked that prompted the stories that poured forth. But I don't think anyone had ever shown an interest in her life as a teenager. We now know that kids in her town usually went to the cemetery after dark. And that one of the best dates was sitting up at someone's wake. Back then bodies were always brought to the home and someone was expected to "sit up"  with the deceased It was explained to us that this way you could stay up all night with your boyfriend and not shock anyone. Mind you ..this was back in the 1920's and 30's....who would have thought????

I never could get a decent answer out of my husband about his youth until I started asking specific questions....where did you go to get a Christmas tree?. What time did you get up Christmas morning? What is the first movie you ever saw in a theater? Do you remember the polio scare of the late 40's and 50's? Did you know anyone who had it?

What's the first song you ever learned? First rock and roll song you learned? First dance you learned to do? Did your mother wear a hat and gloves on Easter? What kind of thing was in your Easter basket? Was there anything you always got for Christmas? what was the first book you read? Your favorite movie when you were a teen? Did you read movie magazines? Comic books?

People always know where they were when Pearl Harbor was hit, FDR died, D -Day, end of the War, Kennedy killed, towers fell. You will always get a story out of that....but it is the everyday parts of peoples lives you really have to dig for.

I was always lucky, my parents loved to tell us stories of their childhoods. Those were my bedtime stories as opposed to fairy tales. I remember mother telling me about having to go to the creek to draw water. Near where they always knelt my grandfather found some pottery shards. Investigation proved that it was a well known watering/ camping place for the Cherokee when traveling from one place to another. After a time he found a stone ax. we always called it a tomahawk...tho I do not believe this is what it actually was. It was way too heavy and big. At the time it still had part of the handle and leather thongs that held the blade in place....tho they had rotted. Back when I was a teenager Mama took it to a museum archeologist to give us an opinion.....after a lot of study and back and forth conversation...they determined it was not actually Cherokee, but much much older than that. IT appeared the Cherokee had either found it or handed it down, and adapted it for their own use. What a treasure.

Most time folks are more than willing to talk if you ask the right questions to start with. People get to an age where some of the things they have been uncomfortable talking about for years...just need airing out. And goodness knows they won't ask one another. If you want to know, you are going to have to ask. The worst they can do is say "no" or they don't remember or tell you that you are fresh or impertinant. Just stay out of reach if they get testy. 

Shannon says this will be a good place to post a request for finding "recent" ancestors. I can search all day long and find people who died a hundred years ago. What I would like to do tho is find some descendants, or at least what happened to them.

This week I am searching for Dorothy Eleanor Seagraves Smith, born about 1922. I cannot find her on the SSDI since they don't use maiden names. I know she was born a Seagraves, married a Norman James Smith, had a son, Norman Richard Smith, and moved away from the family  in North Carolina after her parents died. One person in the family heard from her about 20 years ago, and was under the impression that she had remarried....but no name to go with it. We would all like to find either she or her son or any of their descendants.

Having whined about others poor research habits, I feel the need to unburden myself of my own dumb moves:

I have been doing this for more years than I even want to think about. And most of what I have learned has been from long trial and stupid error. But in my defense,,,,genealogy research was not "the thing" when I first started. I didn't even have a computer then, and even after I got one, there sure wasn't anything online to help out. I was one of the first to sign on to Rootsweb when it came online.....some of you probably remember that and what it was like. We were thrilled to death with the idea...but it took awhile for it to develop into a useful site for actual research.

I spent hours and hours staring at a microfilm machine and sifting thru dusty courthouse records. Gallons of gas going to back and forth to various courthouses and cemeteries.

Needless to say...I missed alot. If I was looking for someone on a census and I found them...hooray. I hand copied their information. (There weren't microfilms that copied anything) The mistake was in not looking at who their neighbors were, or bothering with anyone of the same surname in that area. I would go to a courthouse for a marriage license and copy that and come home. Never looking at the book to see if there were others of the same family.

I have spent more time than I can begin to tell you....backtracking to fix those oversites.

And sources......????? So few they aren't worth mentioning. I figured I would never have so much stuff I wouldn't remember where I got it. WRONG. Now I have massive amounts of info and no clue where it came from.

I don't even have an address book for half the folks I contacted back then.

Folks who start this now are so much better educated on how to go about it than I was. All I had was a paper written by a great uncle back in the 1930's on my Great-grandfather's research. I had no clue and no names to start with.

I have a couple of pieces of advice tho.....and it is much easier with the advent of the internet.

If you are looking for a specific surname on a census, and you find the guy you need....copy that page and the page before and after it. Likely they are living near either their parents, siblings or children. If you do a computer search in a county for a surname and it brings up a bunch of people by that name...unless it is Smith or something like that....then copy that entire list of names. It is almost a leadpipe cinch that you will need it eventually, and if you have that list to hand you will at least have a clue where to start.

Ditto marriage licenses.....while you are at that courthouse...copy every single one in that county by that name if you can reasonably afford to. If not...at least write down all the info on them. You will wish you had.

Cemeteries.....take pictures of every tombstone around the one you need and every one in the graveyard with the surname of interest. Also if it is a church cemetery....take a couple of pictures of the church and surrounding countryside.

Sources...for your own sake....keep a record of who told you what or gave you which piece of info,even if you can't stand the person and know their research is slipshod. Write it down and keep up with it. At least you will know if you run into it again...where the info came from and how reliable it is. And I promise you , people are going to ask how you know. They do now. They didn't used to, but enuff of us have been burned that now we ask....."do you have documentation for that?" And keep up with what county or website you found it in.

Carry a notepad and camera everywhere you go. Try Try Try to transcribe your notes when you get home....if you wait a couple of weeks, that sad shorthand you scribbled down will be a complete mystery to you. Especially if you just wrote down a first name and a date.'" Emily who? ANd what happened to her in 1842--was she born, died, married, joined the military???" I don't even want to think how many people I have with the same first names...

I guess when you boil it all down, my biggest peeve with myself, is lack of documentation and organization on my earliest efforts....and the fact that I am still having to backtrack to fill some of that stuff in.

I have a number of pet peeves and some of them are peevishness at my own personal stupidity. But the thing that gets my blood pressure the highest is the posting of sloppy research. And of course folks who log on to those sites and then promulgate the problem by taking the research and putting it with their stuff and posting it on their sites. Add to that....when you try to tell them where they have it wrong...they get annoyed and never go back and change the information.

For instance I was so excited the other day...someone had posted a father for a man I have been trying to search down for years....and I do mean years....about 20 to be exact. I put a query out about this man and several folks answered me back.....and sent me to different websites. I was just delirious with joy. I scanned down thru the info.....yay!!

Then I looked a little harder.....my man was born in 1802....so say most of the censuses and his tombstone and everything else I can find to back it up. They do have that year on the website and that his father was born in 1796. Now excuse me...but REALLY. How advanced was this man, that he could propigate the species at 6?????.

No it was not buried down in the page of info...it was in the first paragraph. I was sick. I went on down thru the rest of the stuff and on to sources.....and found most of it was flawed and one of the main sources was a person I have been fighting for nearly as long as I have been looking into this family to make them see certain pieces of info on my own direct line  are wrong. And still this person is giving that info to others and it is everywhere. The other sites I checked had exactly the same stuff. Not one person who posted the tree bothered to look and see the impossibility.

If only that were the only branch I have a problem with. But I have another one with an almost identical problem...different researcher. Just no logic to the info. Someone somewhere decided that because the middle name of a person was the same as someone in another state on another census....they must be one in the same person. I won't even go into that story and what I have been thru to prove that one wrong...but still the other stuff is out there and just won't go away.

I promise you...if someone tells me I have the info on their grandfather wrong....I am going to change it and change it immediately.

That hardheadedness is one reason I know a lot of really good researchers who absolutely refuse to share their info at all any more.That is so sad. These folks are top of the line, with the paperwork to back what they say up...but they have become jaded and cynical. I think for too many folks it's all about the number of people they have in their tree, not whether they belong there or not.

Well,...that felt good.