Welcome, my fellow WikiChatterers, to another Weekend Chat! And, greetings from Cathey’s Creek in Transylvania County, where a favorite bumper sticker for residents of the area is a fanged bat under the words, “B*** me.” (Think of something you do with teeth.) With the Labor Day weekend behind us, the touristas have left and the roads are not nearly as crowded. They’ll return for the leaf change in October which, I feel, is not as beautiful as New England in autumn.
On the Home Front: The healing process continues from the procedure to have my evil tooth removed. The shoulder, too, though it is taking its merry time doing so. Neither, of course, are keeping me from those danged outside projects that are eating my time. My wife is a project-a-holic. I, on the other hand, am one who’d rather sit on my duff in front of a computer. She calls WikiTreeing “playing.” I’m insulted! It’s WORK, and work I’d rather do than making repeated trips to the stone business and moving tons of 2’x8’ river rock from the pickup truck to the area where we’ve been working. (I have to admit that it does look much better.) I’m hoping that all our work will add about $20,000,000 to the value of our house. Hahahaha!!! We’re building our own next time.
On the Genealogy Front: My problem getting stuff done efficiently on WikiTree is my scatter-shot approach. I just point a 16-gauge at the computer screen, and whatever gets hit gets worked on. I need a more focused approach, especially with some of the things I need to take care of. Here’s a few things I’ve been working on this week.
1) Going back through my early profiles, I found several that need serious improvement, and one family in particular stood out. So, I started working on a bio for a great-uncle of mine, Landon Sebastian Patterson. Uncle Lan never married or had children. I have a particular fondness for people like this, never married or no descendants, and I love that WikiTree is a place where even “the least of these” can be remembered. I found his middle name on only one set of related documents: his World War I service records. I never knew what the “S” stood for until this week. My last remaining aunt will be the only one to remember him in my immediate family, so an interview with her is on my serious to-do my list.
2) The Easington Colliery Disaster. I got started on this because I read a book of sermons preached at Easington by the famous N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, to people suffering still from the aftermath of the 1951 explosion in the coal mine there and, later, the closure of the mine. Sheryl of the Worldwide Disasters Project has been a huge encouragement, and I’m enjoying hunting up stuff to make it a great page.
3) I mentioned last week about the death of my friend and colleague, Kathy Ronemus, and how we had been looking forward to working on her genealogy. I created a profile for her and began getting ancestors up. No bios yet (except Kathy’s), just sourcing to start. I figure that this is a way, among other important ways, to honor her memory. I’m pretty sure that I can connect her to the Big Tree, and I’I sure have a lot of questions I could have asked her!
Can’t wait to see what fascinating (and often diet-killing!) “Today Is” posts Dorothy has for us this weekend.
Enjoy yourselves in the Chat and let us know what’s up!