Sunday, June 27, 2010

Mining Records, Building My Tree

I really thought that being laid up after surgery I would get tons of letters transcribed and lots of blog posts written. Ha! Things haven't gone well either medically or personally for the last three months and depression wiped out most of my plans. I apologize to all my blogging friends for not staying current on my reading and what you've all been doing. Hopefully I've turned a corner, at least mentally. Physically I have a way to go.

I haven't been totally idle though. I have been actively researching my Kelly line. I mined all of the records I could with a US subscription to Ancestry.com and other free sites. I spent three weeks mining the newspapers at Old Fulton Post Cards, transcribing what I found and then trying to sort out which John or Mary or William each article applied to.

Everything I found was entered into my tree at Ancestry so that my newly discovered cousins would have access to it and they shared their finds with me and helped me sort out who was who. After finding what I could I decided to upgrade my Ancestry subscription so I could find the Canadian records I needed. In an Oh-Duh! moment I realized this also gave me access to English records I was missing and my mining operations have extended well beyond the Kelly's! Since I only want the upgrade for a month or two I have been really focused on tracking down all that I can. It is work that needs to be done but doesn't require much thought and just what the doctor ordered for right now. It hasn't given me much to blog about however.

Then I learned of the death of a distant cousin that had given me much of the information I had on my Hollington line. He was just a couple of years older than me. That got me thinking about what will happen to all of my genealogy records and research if my end should come early. So I have been going through the files on my computer and uploading all of the family pictures and documents to my trees at Ancestry. There are other places I could upload them to and maybe later I will. For now this gets what I have saved and works as an additional back up system for me.

So that's all that has been going on here for the last many weeks. I hope to be at Scanfest this afternoon and hope to catch up with some of you then!

8 comments:

Carol said...

Still praying that the bone starts to heal. Sorry to hear about the depression, it is an ugly monster, eh?? SIGHH. Activity does help, and I think your 'mining' is just what cha need, besides which, it sounds like you are making great progress. Hang in there!!

Miriam Robbins said...

Apple, I really hope to see you at Scanfest today. We have missed you.

Greta Koehl said...

I'll continue to pray for full recovery for you. I think that mining those records is good, constructive therapy, and will give you a lot of material for analysis. One of these days I'll upgrade my Ancestry subscription, too; but I'm just afraid they'll never be able to pull me from the computer then!

Barbara Poole said...

Apple, we are all here for you, hoping for you to bounce back quickly. Thanks for your long update. Nice to see you making progress with your genealogy tho.

Nancy said...

It sounds like you've been having a time of it. I hope the rest of your healing goes quickly and smoothly. I hope your "mining" helps overcome the depression. I've noticed, though, that you continue to add posts on blog through all this upheaval, which is a good thing. Get well soon.

Joan said...

Nice to have you back and writing. I have been rather out of touch for the last couple of months as well --- with a variety of challenges.

May each day find you more healthy and full of vitality. Blessings.

Brenda Leyndyke said...

I am glad to see you are back to blogging. Hopefully your health concerns are all behind you.

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

Thank you all! I am counting down to next Tuesday and very hopeful that I'll be back on both feet then.