How Did I Get Here? My Amazing Genealogy Journey

Wow! Has it been a year already since the last Genealogy Blog Potluck Picnic?! Time flies. Last year, Elizabeth O'Neal of My Descendants Ancestors blog hosted the first potluck picnic on her blog. If you missed it, click here .  This year she is back again as our wonderful host to the festivities. It's not too late to join in. You can check out the details for this year's event here .  When you are invited to a potluck event, you are asked to bring a dish. A Genealogy Blog Potluck Picnic is no different. The theme put forth by Elizabeth O'Neal is this: Q: TELL US HOW YOU DID IT. This is a broad topic that can cover just about anything genealogy-related. The only requirement is that you explain how you did it. Well what I'm bringing to this year's potluck is this. How I created an on-line tree to test a theory I had.  My theory involved a man by the name of Carolina Jones. He's someone who I stumbled across while doing research on my 2nd gre...

Way back in June 2011, I featured my great grandmother Ophelia Bryant's obituary on this blog. Something happened recently that made me want to revisit it. She was for many years the organist of St. Stephen church.... My daughter's so excited to have started started piano lessons. It seems as if now whenever I pass by her bedroom, I catch a glimpse of ladybug practicing on her keyboard. She's continuing in the tradition of many of the women from my mom's side of the family. The piano was the instrument to learn how to play. In general, I wasn't a rebellious child but for some reason I chose not to learn how to play. My mother plays and has a keyboard in her home. Her mother, Mary Bryant Harrison Horton, played the piano. In fact, she had a piano in her living room and an organ. My grandmother Mary and her sisters learned how to play the piano thanks to their mother, Ophelia.  My 2nd great grandmother Jonas Bryant had a piano. I learned about that when I...

Back in 2012, I visited Mt Olive Cemetery in Riverdale, NC. It's the final resting place for many from my Mitchell and Sampson family lines. At the time of that visit, I hadn't figured out what became of my 2nd great grand aunt Margaret Mitchell. She was the sister of my 2nd great grandmother Rosa Mitchell Jones of Morehead City, NC. A couple a years after that trip I discovered that she had remarried after her first marriage to Alonzo Pelham ended in divorce. She wed William Thompson on Oct. 2, 1912 in Riverdale.  Image courtesy of Ancestry.com Source Information:  Ancestry.com. North Carolina, Marriage Records, 1741-2011 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015. Original data: North Carolina County Registers of Deeds. Microfilm. Record Group 048. North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC. This was the last record I was able to locate for Maggie for the longest time. That is until a couple of months ago, when I started to do so...

Here's some pictures of our family splashing at Southwick Beach State Park and having a lovely dinner at Tin Pan Galley in Sackets Harbor last week. I love these little trips we take. Summertime is all about making memories.