WANDERINGS FROM YOUR PRESIDENT
by Gayle Stuart
My hobby is genealogy, and I raise dust bunnies as pets.
While we have been pursuing our hobby of genealogy, the dust bunnies have been collecting also. Before the holidays, I felt I should make an attempt to banish them from the house, but as you all know, they keep coming back. If anyone has any suggestions on how to remedy this, please let me know. I guess I could hire a housekeeper as some of our ancestors did. They did this by taking in an older daughter of a family and used her to help around the house. Some may have been closer to a school so that the child could get an education along with earning their keep within another family.
I hope that everyone had a good Holiday. If you had a chance to ask questions of any of your older relatives, I hope you took advantage of this opportunity. Many of us no longer have a chance to do this.
Leo and I traveled to Scotland this past summer, in search of Stuart family information, taking pictures and gaining a better idea of how they may have lived and worked. We will try to write a narrative to go along with the pictures, documents, church records, etc., that we have been collecting.
We all say that we are going to make New Year’s resolutions and I have tried to put together some for our Walnut Genealogy Society.
As of this time, we have a small collection of family histories. I would like to see more of these in our library. I know it is difficult to write about what we have found, but I would like you to try.
Lincoln Cemetery: We keep finding more material on the families that lived in this area and feel we should add it to our book.
We always have more obituaries to add. At this time we are trying to do an index to the Layton Cemetery. I am still looking for more obits for the Catholic Cemetery. Early on, this cemetery was south of town and we know some of the people were moved, but so far I have not found when they did this.
It is an ongoing project to make a list of people that have lived in Walnut at one time. We are trying to place them where they lived. We have pictures of quite a number of the houses with names of residents. These are books that anyone can look at for additions or corrections.
We are doing the businesses around town also. If anyone has pictures or any information along this line, we would like to hear from you. Betty Griffith and Don Walter have been helping Ruby Andersen with these projects.
Just as a reminder, someone is in our room at the library each Tuesday afternoon from 2 –5. If you want to search old newspaper articles for some of our projects, we would like to see you.
gbs