Life on a farm seven decades ago was all work and little to no cash on hand. My ancestors had fruit and vegetable farms. After feeding their families, the remainder of their crops were sold on the market for enough cash to pay property taxes, water assessments and to purchase the few store bought goods that entered their homes. Bartering was common place. Farmers would trade services, extra crops, blacksmithing and labor with each other in lieu of cash trading hands. However, farm hands had to be paid cash money from the meager resources the farms produced. Families made their own ...

My 10th great grandfather, Dirck Hals and his more famous brother, Frans were Dutch Master artists. Born in Haarlem, Netherlands in the late 1500’s, both gained fame for their work although Frans was the more commercially successful and best remembered of the two brothers. Dirck Hals was probably a student of his older brother, the famous artist, Frans . Other painters who influenced Dirck were Esaias van de Velde and Willem Buytewech. Apart from a few portraits, he devoted himself exclusively to the painting of conversation pieces of the cheerful domestic life of prosperous ...

Both of my grandmothers died within a couple of months of each other when I was five. I don’t have extensive memories of them. I know that my interest in ancestry is associated with their passing. They were there and they were gone. Is that what happens to grandmas? We were eating breakfast when the call came about my mom’s mother. We were just going to have dinner when the call came about my dad’s mother. After the second death, I remember asking my mother if her grandparents had disappeared the same way. Her answer involved stories of her grandparents and stories ...

Some of my earliest memories of visiting extended family members involves adhoc meetings by ancestors graves on Decoration Day. Yes, I’m old enough to know ‘Memorial Day’ as ‘Decoration Day’. My mother always made sure that we visited all of the graves of her ancestors and my fathers ancestors that were buried within a 30 mile radius on that day in May. I’d sit in the back seat and hold all of the cans, bottles and containers of flowers upright from grave to grave, cemetery to cemetery so the water didn’t spill and the gathered flowers ...

As a youth, my parents and I visited the graves of my fathers parents and grandparents to clear the weeds from them in the week before Memorial Day each year. Buried in the same plot were my father’s two baby sisters, two uncles and an aunt. The cemetery soil should best be described as a granite sandbar that existed in the ancient Lake Bonneville. The mountain immediately to the north is solid granite and obviously the large granules of granite in cemetery hill came from that source. They are interspersed with silt from the softer stone in the mountain to the east. Clearing the ...

I stopped by the FamilySearch Pilot site for a ‘week’ yesterday. The visit was planned for only a few minutes to look for a birth record for one of my ancestors who was born in New Hampshire. Browsing directly to that collection, success was almost immediate. That was easy! While there, why not refine my search and search for the rest of my ancestors who were born in New Hampshire too? That’s when the ‘week’ started. Success, success, success, mixed with some failures. The success continued all the way back to the mid-1600’s. Thinking the ...

My maternal grandfather was the last living farmer by profession in my lineage. We’ve ‘advanced’ since then and make our living using the technology of today. My paternal grandmother was a farmer too, with 200 acres of fruit trees, hay and vegetables. Cash was always a problem, but there was always food on the table, even if it was plain fare at times. Of course my siblings and I have gardens and small orchards at our homes, but they are considerably smaller than the acres of ground that grandma and grandpa planted to feed and support their families. Grandpa grew Utah ...

One of the opportunities associated with the acquisition of old photos is the pleasure of posting the images in locations where they can be seen by others. An old shoe box of them was included in the family history collection that my mother gave me. The photos are of family neighbors and friends taken in the late 1800’s and first two decades of the 1900’s. Even though they were precious to her, she wasn’t afraid to write on them, even listing names on the bodies of the individuals in the images. I wish she had written the list of names on a piece of note paper and tucked ...

After researching my ancestry for the majority of my life, I started to think that I was doing a great job. Then I decided to print a sixteen generation pedigree chart using OnePage Genealogy at BYU. I’d better live a LONG time yet if I’m going to populate the entire chart. There is a LOT of missing ancestral information in my records. My mother spent the second half of her life researching her ancestry and also made great headway on my fathers lineage. I helped her in the quest as a young man and knew how thick her old genealogy books were. It seemed like she had found it ...

When our side-by-side refrigerator failed a while ago, we were inconvenienced to the point we had to hurriedly eat as much ice cream as we could stomach and hurriedly cook the meat and other frozen goods in the freezer lest it all go to waste. During our marriage, other refrigerators have also failed to function, immediately throwing us into action to find a repairman or to purchase a replacement unit. We’re a bunch of softies. Probably about as tough as marshmallows. Of course, here at the manor, we have addressed that issue with other means of surviving without a functioning ice ...

Recently, a television program showing current day scenes of the famous towns and locations from the “Old West” caught my eye. A couple of scenes featuring the cemetery in Gold Hill, Nevada reminded me of my visit there. We were in a hurry to reach our destination in California, so my desire to stop and patrol the cemetery was shelved. I love stopping at cemeteries that I spot when driving and reading the tombstone inscriptions. They frequently educate me far more completely than reading a history of the area. Of course, I always take photos of tombstones in these locations. ...

While spending a day taking tombstone photos recently, I stopped to take photos of the general setting while standing beside the grave my great grandparents. Pondering the scene, I realized that I could see the tombstones of three sets of 2nd great grandparents, one set of great grandparents and one set of my grandparents with just a slight movement of my eyes. Other ancestors are buried close by. In a ten minute drive, I could visit the graves four generations of my ancestors except for one set in California and one in Massachusetts. Over the years, I’ve encouraged members of my ...

I know that a number of you have iPhones. You probably aren’t aware that you can purchase an application to let you access new FamilySearch on your phone! Check out the mobileTree application. I keep much of my genealogy and research on my website (some public, some password protected). Combine online data with mobileTree and the available GPS application and you have a Killer tool for doing genealogy research! Imagine….. The billions of records of nFS, your own data, photos, and ability to interface with all of them using a device that fits in the palm of your hand. ...

Talking to your grandchildren is often a shock to your reality. I tell them stories and they often reply, “Grandpa, you are so funny!” I tilt my head to the side and thoughtfully consider what I have said that could elicit such a response. I quickly realize that my verbal language is full of symbolic phrases that often express full paragraphs and concepts to others of my generation, yet are often meaningless to the Disney Channel generation. Conversely, some of their phases are equally meaningless to me. I don’t think I’ll ever abandon the phrases that have been ...

Genealogical research often takes you down many paths, sometimes just because they are so interesting. After several hours of reading interesting documents, this series of documents remained in my memory. Dear Sir, Would You Please Pardon Momma? 18 Mar 1895 | Logan, Utah Thirteen year old Polly Beardall found herself raising her siblings due to unfortunate events in the lives of her parents. Apparently, her father John Gell Beardall left home in 1891 or 1892 saying the was going to Oregon to look for work and was never heard from again. He left his wife, Eliza Richards Beardall and four ...