I am very thankful for my geek family, who have helped me make this blog a bit prettier and more functional than I could have done on my own. My dear husband and son are wonderfully computer literate, and especially talented when it comes to CSS and HTML. (I’m trying to learn it, but would just rather research and write.) Last night we got the pull-down menu mostly fixed under “Family Trees,”which used to be “Pedigrees.” (Sounds sort of stuffy British peerage so we changed the title.) It still doesn’t list the Lee-Alexander-Aiken family on the pull down, but you can access that branch if you just click on “Family Trees.” Clicking on a family from this page will take you to all the posts associated with that family. This is probably the best way to find pertinent-to-you posts, since there are so very many families discussed on this blog.
[Disclaimer: My dear husband and son would have made a much nicer blog if I had not been insistent on doing most of it with WordPress myself. I have tried not to bother them too much with blog fixing, so all poor qualities are due to my strong-willed German heritage, I suppose.]
George A. Roberts (1861-1939), above, was a bit of a geek in his day. As a farmer he had to be a tinkerer. He embraced new-fangled gadgets as well, and was one of the first in the area to have indoor plumbing and an automobile. His wife, Ella V. Daniel, was thrilled to finally have running water in the kitchen where she cooked for dozens of men at harvest season! I am sure our son is so handy partly because of George, plus from his father/my husband, who is descended from people who worked with their hands, like farmers and shoe-makers, and has a bit of German engineering genetics thrown in from somewhere, I am sure. Many trips in the stroller to Home Depot as a baby to get out of the house on a rainy day were probably helpful too- our son first counted to 100 sitting on the floor with big landscape spikes. (We did buy them and then he got to help use a sledgehammer…great fun.)
I am also thankful for Thomas MacEntee and his wonderful blogs, Hack Genealogy and GeneaBloggers. His webinars and shared information has done much to advance genealogical research, and get many of us to write blogs to share what we have learned.
One of those who shares her genealogy and writes it beautifully is Cynthia Mulcahy/Mulberrygrrl of We’re All Relative. I am not related but her amazing prose is inspiring to writers and does relate to many of the lines I am researching. I particularly enjoyed her recent post, “I’m Finally Embracing My Scots-Irish Ancestry.” She uses great images to illustrate her points, and she discusses many facts I had not known. This post mentions that the ‘Fighting Scots-Irish’ were enticed to America to be a ‘buffer’ between civilized cities and the wild frontier- so many of my ancestors were just those folks.
I cannot end this “Thankful Thursday” post without mentioning Jim Whitener, who pushed me into starting this blog after hearing yet another Legacy Family Tree Webinar on blogging how-to. I am looking forward to more posts on his family, when he has some time to write about his ancestors, i.e., when he is not enjoying his rich legacy of children and grandchildren. 😉
Notes, Sources, and References:
1) From our family photo treasure chest. This is one-thrid of a portrait of the three Roberts brothers, taken about 1900 in Newton, Jasper, Iowa.
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