New Year’s Resolutions

I’m sitting here looking out my kitchen window at the bees and butterflies visiting the blossoms on the lemon tree in my garden.  I’ve only lived in this home for about five months and the lemon tree was here when I arrived, so if I have blossoms now, when will I have lemons? Certainly not before next year Which brings me to the subject of today’s musings. Am I really going to make New Year’s Resolutions?  Somehow whenever I do, I never manage to keep them. But I guess I’ll give it a try one more time and see what happens.

1. Spend more time in the garden and less time on the computer.  Or maybe take the laptop into the garden, that’s a nice compromise.
2. Try to solve some of the brick wall puzzles in my genealogy database.
3. Lose that extra 5 pounds I’ve put on over the holidays (little chance of doing that I’m afraid).
4. Check out an exciting new find I’ve made on the Internet.  And why it took me so long to find it I’ll never understand.  Did you know that MIT offers about 1800 undergraduate and graduate courses online?  For free?  I didn’t until today.  There are so many classes offered I’d like to take that it’s hard to know where to start.  Maybe a history course on ancient Greece or maybe one on the Civil War and Reconstruction.  I seem to spend a lot of genealogy research time in the decades before and after the Civil War.  Might be useful.
5. Update my family genealogy website at least once a month.  (In case you’d like to visit, see my Blogroll for Strutton Family Connections.)

OK, that’s enough New Year’s Resolutions. Let’s take a look at one of those brick wall puzzles that keep giving me problems.

I’ve been working recently on the family of Sandford Rhodes and wife Johanna Barnes.  One of his granddaughters, Frances Rhodes, married into a collateral Strutton line of my family, William H. Strutton (1831-1912).  Her parents were Eppy Rhodes and Martha Deatherage.  In reviewing the 1850 and 1860 Federal Census Records, I have a problem with too many daughters listed in the household of Eppy and Martha.

1850 has Susan E., born about 1844, and Nancy O., born about 1847.  1860 has Frances, born about 1844, Ursula, born about 1846, and Nancy, born about 1848.  Now something is not right here.  Maybe Susan E. should have been listed as Susan F.; then Susan and Frances could be the same person.  Nancy seems to be okay, it’s not unusual for the ages listed on census records to differ by a year or two.  But who is Ursula?  And where did she come from?  Is she possibly a niece or other relative of Eppy Rhodes?

I have not found a marriage record for Susan, Ursula or Nancy.  Nor have I found a death record for any of the three women.  So I don’t have just one brick wall, I have three.  If anybody out there knows anything at all about this family, please get in touch with me and let me know.

Hello world!

Welcome to Kvala’s Genealogy Ramblings. This is my first blog and my first posting to a blog.  So hope things go the way I want them to.

I started my genealogy research about 40 years ago.  Then in 1999 I posted my first genealogy website on the Internet.  It was called Strutton Family Connections and had less than a hundred names in the database.  Eight years and hundreds of hours of research later I now have over 12,000 names in my database and have made many new friends and met lots of relatives I didn’t know I had.

If you are one of the millions of people who are writing a family history or doing genealogy research or just trying to find your roots, I hope you’ll drop by here often.  I’ll sometimes be talking about genealogy research in general, techniques I’ve found useful in the past, resources available to amateur genealogists both online and off, as well as topics specific to the family lines that I personally am researching.

Thanks for dropping by and have a Happy New Year!