Someone in Australia recently sent me a package of pedigree charts. One of them says that I'm descended from King Edward I. Actually, I'm descended from three of his children, whose lines converged over the 2 1/2 centuries after him.

I don't put too much stock in it when people say they can trace their ancestry back to the 1600's, let alone 1400's and 1300's. The governments didn't keep track of people like they do today with birth certificates, marriage certificates, certificates of death, and census. You might get lucky and find church records, but I don't know how consistent those are. In this case, though, I figure the King's lines and the various Earls' lines are probably well documented.

All three of the lines converge on the Boleyns. Two of the lines, Sir Thomas Boleyn and Lady Elizabeth Howard married. They had Anne (King Henry VIII's wife who was beheaded in 1536), George (beheaded in 1536) and Mary (died in 1542. Lucky her). Mary married Sir William Carey, from the other Edward I line, and I'm in part descended from them (apparently).

I was talking about this a bit tonight and someone said, "Oh well, I'm descended from William Shakespeare." As cool as that would be (if true, I don't know how clear Shakespeare's lines are), my ancestor is still cooler. Mine built the bloody Tower of London. Mine tortured Mel Gibson to death, hacked him up, and sent bits of him to Scottish warlords. :P

Lord Horatio Nelson is also a cousin.

Okay, /name dropping.

My parents have a letter from someone showing how my mom and I are descended from George Soule, a Mayflower Compact signer. I could so join the Society of Mayflower Descendants. Since the person who wrote the letter was admitted, all I'd have to do is prove I'm related to her. Piece of cake.

So I'm on my five day in town 'I need a vacation' vacation and I'm exhausted. I'll I've done is run around and work.

I cleaned the house and ran errands all day Wednesday. Most productive.

Then I went on a day trip yesterday. I've decided that I'll go and look for dead people on every vacation that I take. I had planned to go with my Grandma, but my parents decided to come at the last minute. That's great because my dad drove his car and Bryce didn't have to worry about getting home.

I wanted to go to Hastings, Fairfield, and Edgar, NE. Grandma has always wanted to see that bust of a tourist trap in Kearney, so we went a little bit out of the way to see it. It's a bridge that goes across Interstate 80 with a little museum about the history of transportation across Nebraska. The Mormon Trail, Oregon Trail, and California Trail all passed close to Kearney, so there was a lot about the pioneers. Then it went on to cover the Pony Express, telegraph wires, Trans-Contintental Railroad, and finally cars.

There are no artifacts in this museum. It was mostly displays of dummies with covered wagons, a handcart, a stagecoach, etc. It was all very well done and there were headphones you could wear to hear journal excerpts and commentary from the times (yes, those Mormon journal excerpts are very familiar by now). All-in-all, it's well done and worth stopping in if you're already in the area.

Finding the dead people was a great success. We found Grandma's father, a couple of his siblings, and his parents in the Hastings Parkview Cemetery. Grandma didn't know where he was buried because her mother left him when Grandma was young. Then we found Grandma's mother's parents (as well as a pair of aunts and uncles) and grandparents in the Fairfield Cemetery (Fairfield is a small farming community of 495 people. I had to go in the gas station and ask where the cemetery is. The attendant and the three old men hanging out there answered me without batting an eye). It ended up that the people who died in Edgar where buried in the Fairfield Cemetery, so we could end our trip there.

And tonight is a church camp out. I've never gone to one before because I always work. We haven't had time to pack for that yet, so I should be doing that now, but there isn't much to do because it's only one night. Bryce and I usually try to camp for a couple of nights in the fall, but we can't really make that happen right now since Slinky needs daily injections. But camping for one night will be fun.

And I'd like to get some cleaning done because someone's coming tomorrow to look at the basement half bath that I'd like to get updated. But I doubt that cleaning is going to happen. I'd also like to get the Halloween decorations out, but I doubt that will happen, either.

There for a while, when I was devoting almost every free moment to family history research, people would ask me if I'm related to anyone famous. I do have an ancestor who may have been a cousin of Robert Fulton, but no one really seems to know for sure.

My Great Great Great Great Grandfather on my mother's side did invent a shock machine, though.



( But how does it work? What does it cure?Collapse )

This is something my great-great-great grandfather, John Clare, wrote before he died in 1890. It was in the newspaper with his obituary and I hope the typos were the newspaper's, not his.

The Believer's Refuge

We are all pilgrims here below,
  Misfortunes us surround;
While here on earth, no happiness
  Or peace of mind is found.

Put not your trust in earthly friends,
   For at the first alarm,
When adversity's cold winds o'erwhelm,
   They'll leave you to the storm;

When at a distance, first you hear
   Misfortunes thunder roar -
Fly then to Christ, before the storm
   Shall Break upon they shore -

And lay the burden at his feet,
   And cleave unto his side;
And hide thy face from every fear,
   Until the storm subside.

The bark, while anchored in the bay,
   Is safe from every harm;
While in the Saviour's arms you lay,
   Your sheltered from the storm;

Should you presume to work the helm,
   And face the raging sea,
Your feeble bark it will o'erwhelm -
   You'll mourn your destiny.

But if to Jesus Christ you ply,
   And when the tempests roar -
You'll hear him say "be still, it is I."
   He'll land you safe ashore.

I've been losing a lot of sleep to looking up my family history.  I've found a lot of new stuff online, mostly about families that married into the Woods line.  But it's just what people say about their own families and I have to figure out how to verify all of it.  My dad says that he'll split the money for a paid Ancestry.com account.  Wheee!

In other news, things are wonderful.  I really can't think of how my life could be better.  *cough* Other than Bryce selling a screenplay *cough*