Keeping Grandma Alive...and all the others, too (including yourself)
The summer I was 5 or 6, and my sister Joyce was 9 or 10, our mom (Gladys Martin Heiser) asked my Uncle Tommy to bring her some tomatoes the next time he came to visit. She wanted to put some in the freezer. A few weeks later Uncle Tommy brought us about four bushels of really ripe tomatoes. My…
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Nurture was a recent prompt for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. That prompt immediately made me think of my great-grandparents, Jeremiah Daniel “Dan” THOMAS (1858-1946) and Margaret Ann “Maggie” GRANT THOMAS (1870-1948). Here’s some stories about Dan and Maggie that show why. Brotherly love In 1886, Dan left Richland County, South Carolina for Chesterfield County, South Carolina to help his…
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Brick Wall is one of the recent prompts for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. I’ve written about most of my brick wall ancestors before, so I’m taking a different approach with this prompt. At the house-end of the driveway of my childhood home in Vienna, Virginia, there was a brick wall. It wasn’t there when the house was built. It…
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I love doing newspaper research. Have you tried it? I was on Newspapers.com the other day doing a surname search for one of the alternate spellings of my last name Heiser. It is also spelled Hiser, Hyser, and a few other ways. Using Hiser, I searched in Maryland newspapers from 1870-1880. I narrowed down to newspapers serving Frederick and Carroll…
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Earlier this year I wrote about the challenge of searching for the Dickens Family Cemetery. If you didn’t read that post already, here’s the link so you can read it now. Then come back after reading it to hear the rest of the story. (Actually I can’t make the link work. I do not like this new WordPress. Sigh.) My…
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The prompt this week for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is Family Photo. I picked a photo from a Martin family reunion held in June 1978 in Vienna, Virginia. My grandfather was J. Daniel MARTIN (1886-1955). He was married to my grandmother, Florrie THOMAS MARTIN (1894-1979). Much of their offspring were in attendance along with two of Daniel’s siblings and…
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