WANDERINGS FROM YOUR PRESIDENT
BY GAYLE STUART
FLOOR: The place for storing your priceless genealogy records – also know as flat storage.
For the past 3 months, I have been trying to get the Stuart information all in one place. This summer Leo and I are hoping to make a trip to Scotland and I feel that we should know as much as we can before we go. Our plan is to go on a tour with a group, then rent a car for about another week, and stay for 4-5 days in the area from which the Stuart family came. Our hope is to see where they lived, went to church, etc. This is what we did with my families when we toured the Scandinavian countries two years ago.
I have known for a long time that we had more information than we knew by the boxes and old dresser drawers that I had never fully gone through. My first job was to sort out the different families and then try to make sense of what we have.
We have found pictures – marked and unmarked, we have pictures of the parents and 5 of 9 children of the original immigrants that came over from Scotland in 1845. We have pictures of all of the next generation and have found write-ups of most of their weddings. We are still working on obits for some of this generation. This project has given us a chance to visit with a number of the cousins to get copies of what they have, or to get them searching.
Most of us know what small town newspapers have in them. Some of these short paragraphs have interesting tidbits. I have found when someone of the family has gone to visit another of the family, when cattle were sold and went on the train to Chicago, and when hogs were sold at 300-400 pounds apiece. Sometimes we can find when a house is being built or that the family has moved into their new home. Come see us and spend some time with our newspaper collection.
I don’t think we can all have the same filing system and feel comfortable with it; you need to find what works for you. Get all of your findings into a notebook and in some way record your information so that other family members can follow the history that you have uncovered. Family Tree is one computer program that is used by many people; there are others on the market. If you do not have a computer, at least try to get things typed so that someone reading it in the future will not say they cannot read the handwriting.
If help is needed, please feel free to come into the library on Tuesday afternoons when someone will be there to help you.
GbS