Southern Greens

This Guy will have a marker soon

2012-01-27T08:21:00.000-06:00

Guy Fulford was my grandfather's first cousin. He was a fisherman in Cortez, Florida and was born in 1894, the son of Nathan Hooker Fulford and Betty Manson Whitehurst Fulford. Guy served in the Navy during WWI and I noticed when I surveyed Palma Sola Cemetery in Bradenton, Florida ten years ago that he didn't have a marker on his grave.

Guy died in 1942 and his grave has a large cement vault over it but no marker other than a small funeral home temporary marker that has been there for almost 70 years. Unfortunately none of the family members could remember when in 1942 he died so I couldn't order a marker for his grave.

I don't like having to pay for research so I tried to locate a newspaper obituary without any success. I found him listed on a index of the Tampa Tribune for December 4, 1942 but couldn't find the actual paper. I finally broke down and ordered the death certificate from the State. It shows he died on December 3, 1942 as a result of Coronary Thrombosis. The death certificate said he and his wife Mamie Giddins Fulford were divorced, a fact I didn't know. His sister Susie Fulford Guthrie gave the personal information on the record.

So now we will get a marker for him.

Broken markers

2012-01-21T03:40:00.000-06:00

I was reminded of an old broken tombstone marker recently when I was looking for a family photo. My wife and I found the grave of her ancestor, Thomas Longacre several years ago in Alabama.

He is buried in the Longacre Cemetery in Jackson County. There are only two Longacres there so I assume he owned the land.

Thomas Longacre was born in Virginia in 1788 but like many in his generation migrated to Indian lands when the government moved them west. He settled in the northeastern corner of Alabama and obtained a homestead grant in Jackson County. On the 1850 census he owned 1200 acres and it also showed he had 9 slaves.

He died in 1863 and was buried next to his wife Judith Ireson Longacre who had died five years before.

Over the last hundred and fifty years, the grave marker has been broken into many pieces. The section with most of the inscription has been placed upright against his stone tomb and you can barely make out a few of the words.

"Tears of her….(not legible)
... was devoted
to the service of the
Lord during which time
he was a member of
the Regular Baptist"

What do you remember

2012-01-14T00:02:00.000-06:00

The local newspaper asked me to share one memory of Cortez, Florida in the "old days" for an article they were doing. I'm not really old enough to talk about the old days. I would probably need my sister in Virginia to do that.

Anyway, here it is, just in case it never makes it to print:

I used to spend summers and school holidays in Cortez and loved going fishing with my grandfather, Tink Fulford. We didn't fish on Sundays because almost everyone went to church but Sunday night it was ok to go fishing. My grandmother insisted we go to the Church of Christ both Sunday morning and Sunday night. Grandpa Tink didn't go to church on Sunday night and he wanted to leave as soon as possible but he wasn't going to tell my grandmother we couldn't go to church. I would have to run from the church building to the dock as soon as the service was over. Grandpa knew exactly what time we should be there and he would untie, start up the boat and wait. I could hear the boat engine from a block away. He would push off from the dock as soon as he saw me getting close. I had to run and jump on as the boat was pulling off. I don't think he would have left us if we missed the boat but he sure acted like it.

The Crabpot

2012-01-07T02:26:00.000-06:00

This is only partly about genealogy research. Three or four years ago I came across some Harvey family members from Carteret County North Carolina. They saw something I wrote about my Foreman family and wanted to know if their Foreman ancestor was related.

It turned out that their great great grandmother, Cornelia Foreman Harvey was the sister of my great great grandmother Hope Jane Foreman. We exchanged several emails and they had some old photos they sent me which I appreciated.

Then this past December I saw a newspaper article about Neal Harvey of Davis, North Carolina and the Core Sound Christmas Trees he was making out of Crabpots. In Florida we call them Crab Traps, but folks in Eastern North Carolina have their own dialect, so they call them Crabpots. A cousin in Cortez, Florida stores a bunch of them next to my mother's house and she has never had very merry thoughts about them, but Neal Harvey got the idea he could brighten up Christmas with them.

Neal has made and sold Crabpots for years and since the fishing business hasn't been too good in recent years decided to use the material and shape a tree out of it. The result is a perfect Christmas tree that can stand up to just about anything mother nature can throw at it. Crab traps have to be strong, since they stay in the water for months at a time and if they develop a hole the fisherman's catch doesn't make it to market.

We bought a 6 foot Core Sound Christmas tree this year and proudly put it in our front yard. Our kids and neighbors will tell you our annual decorations are pretty lame but this year we started a new trend.

Finding Grandma

2011-12-31T07:48:00.000-06:00

I found one of my long lost grandmothers. Actually she is step great great grandmother.

Sarah Winiford Strickland Green was the 2nd wife of my ancestor John Green. He died young, sometime about 1865 but she remained in the Taylor County Florida area up until at least 1900. She was on the census that year but until recently I never knew what happened to her after 1900.

I have her photo as it was in my great grandparents bible. I knew her grandson John Evans had moved to Suwanee County Florida and I found him on the 1910 census. One of his great grandsons contacted me recently and gave me some more information about the family in Suwanee County. I started looking at public records and found a death listing for a Mrs. Green in 1918. No first name is shown.

I decided to request the death certificate from the State of Florida so see if it had any other information that could tell me if it was Sarah. It took the State a couple tries to send me the correct record but finally I received a death certificate showing this Mrs. Green died on October 10, 1918. It also listed her date of birth as being January 2, 1838 in Alabama. That didn't match Sarah Green as she had listed her birth month as November 1838 on the 1900 census. I noticed the death certificate listed her age as 80 years, 1 month, 1 day. If they were off by one year, and she was 79 instead of 80, subtracting it from her death date her day of birth would be November 15, 1838. So I am satisfied this is Sarah. Either way the birth date on the certificate does not match the age.

She was buried in Siloam Methodist Church Cemetery in Columbia County near the Suwanee County border. The cousin went out to the cemetery but couldn't find a marker. At least we know what happened to her. Her husband, John Green is still a mystery but maybe one day he will turn up also.

All's well that ends well

2011-12-24T03:37:00.000-06:00

I have to change my MO about using real names for this story. Not sure they would appreciate it, even though for now it looks like it has ended well.

I "met" via email a 2nd cousin a while ago who lives in Florida. She is the granddaughter of my grandmother Fulford's first cousin. After exchanging emails about the family history and other things for two years, she asked if I could help her find her mother.

It turns out she was adopted as a baby by our cousin and didn't know it until she was grown. Her birth mother was an 18 year old , unmarried girl who was working at a hotel in St. Petersburg when she got pregnant. She did the right thing at the time and put the baby up for adoption.

Fast forward 50 years and the daughter wants to find out about her birth family. She had actually paid $2,000 to the adoption agency to get very limited records that had a name and nothing else. She was able to locate a subsequent husband of her mother in St. Petersburg but they had divorced after a couple years and he had no idea what happened to her. She was a free spirit who was only known to be somewhere else.

So with just a name and approximate date of birth I started looking for her, using the same tools I use to do genealogy research. Online marriage & divorce records, death notices, city directories, newspaper articles, family trees posted at ancestry.com etc. I soon found out who the grandparents were but they had both died within the last few years.

I couldn't locate an obituary for either of them but after a while found a online family tree that had them listed. It didn't show any children but I knew the missing mom was a twin with at least one sister because it said this in the family notes. I contacted the person who posted the family tree on ancestry and had no response for almost two months. Then after several short, one line emails with no information that spread out over several more months I received two emails in one day.

The writer, who never gave me more than a first name said she had been in touch with the missing mom and they wanted to contact my cousin. I sent the email on to her, and she followed up and quickly talked by phone to her first cousin, aunt and was told how to contact her birth mother.

So wow, this search for dead relatives can take you to some interesting places.

William Gannon Fulford

2011-12-17T05:32:00.000-06:00

When you do family history research sometimes you find more questions than answers.

I was looking at family records in Craven County North Carolina recently and found the death certificate for William Gannon Fulford. If you just record the day of birth and death you would have put these in your records and gone on. I like to look at the original documents because I have often found facts that connected with some other person I was researching.

In this case, I noticed an unusual cause of death. It is listed as being the result of a stab wound in the abdomen and a homicide.

William Gannon Fulford was the son of Denard Roberts Fulford and Sarah Elizabeth Edwards. Denard was born in the North Carolina and probably a relative. William was just shy of his 30th birthday when he died in 1914.

He had never married and I don't really know much about him except for his unusual demise. He was buried in Cedar Grove cemetery in New Bern, North Carolina. I have just started to look for his story but haven't found anything yet. It may take a while but I am sure the record is out there somewhere.

The Power of Mistletoe

2011-12-10T07:50:00.002-06:00

I wrote a while back about the Steamboat Mistletoe and family connections to the ship's captain.

This past summer while visiting family in Cortez, Florida we spent some time at the Florida Maritime Museum and since I had my dog on one of the days I was relegated to walking the grounds. As I did I came across a new exhibit they have installed.

The propeller from the Mistletoe!

In 1917 the ship's job of carrying passengers and freight was past. It was sold for scrap to Ed Pillsbury of the Snead's Island Boatworks.

He planned to convert in into a seagoing barge. Pillsbury wasn't able to make the conversion work so apparently out of frustration, he hauled the ship out of the water and burned it.

The only thing salvaged from the ship was the propeller. It has now found it's way to Cortez along with the remains of the Snead's Island Boatworks.

Three Sisters

2011-12-03T08:03:00.000-06:00

This is not about three mountain peaks, food groups, islands or a trendy restaurant. Three Sisters seems to be a popular name or destination. I only had two so don't know what it was like. I guess if there are three in a family they might be closer together than if only two.

This is just a short story about three sisters who I found buried together in a very rural cemetery. This past summer my wife and I took a long detour to find a cemetery where my great grandmother was buried. On the way to Sandhill Cemetery in Taylor County Florida we drove past Sealey Cemetery.

I had received directions from a cousin to Sandhill Cemetery but they mistakenly told me how to get to Sealey Cemetery. Thankfully I had my GPS and the coordinates so was able to make my way to the correct place. It was another 4-5 miles down dirt roads surrounded by land that had all the trees removed by local lumber companies.

Sealey Cemetery is 7 1/2 miles from the nearest paved road, on Jody Morgan Road south of Hwy 19 in Taylor County. It would be a long walk if you had car trouble on the way. Since my directions took me to this place I decided to look into who was buried in this small plot. I found four Civil War veteran's graves and several people I'm related to via the Ezell and Strickland family.

I also found the three sisters. In fact their graves are some of the newest ones in the place. Three sisters who were born within a mile or two of this location who ended up buried there sixty years later. I found the three sisters listed on this 1945 Florida State census.

I don't know if their parents are there. There was no marker for them in the list I found online. The parents were divorced in 1950 so maybe they moved away.

The three daughters of Tom J. Lee and Sallie Russell Lee all married, at least once but their husbands were not on the list of burials either. Just the three sisters.

Martha Lee Denmark was born May 21, 1932 and died July 15, 1969. She married Henry Denmark.

Annie Mae Lee Cruce was born April 17, 1930 and died May 10, 1990. She married Penny Parker and later Willie Joe Cruce.

Sallie Lee Ayers was born May 30, 1938 and died November 9, 1988. She married a Grantham and later James Ray Ayers.

Priscilla and Aquila

2011-11-25T17:58:00.000-06:00

I don't know about other folks but we had a difficult time naming our children. We had all the name your baby books and got advise from friends and family but they didn't help much. I think we came up with good names, reflecting both our southern heritage and wanting our girls to be independent of encumbrances.

You have to admit, it would take a preacher to name his kids Priscilla and Aquila. But that is what James Hamilton Wentworth did on January 11, 1889. Wentworth was married to Elizabeth Green the sister of my great grandfather when they had twins in Bilowry, now part of the Eglin Air Force base in present day Santa Rosa County Florida.

Wentworth was working as a Baptist preacher and missionary in this remote area after a diverse career as an Lieutenant in the CSA, school teacher, Superintendent of Taylor County Florida Schools, Judge, Census Taker and Lawyer. There isn't much there in Bilowry now other than mosquitoes and sand gnats so you can only imagine what it was like in 1889.

Priscilla and Aquila were first century missionaries who went with the Apostle Paul on his travels and risked their lives for him. James and Elizabeth Wentworth were probably thinking of their remote home and difficult life in 1889 when they decided on the names.

Elizabeth apparently had a hard pregnancy and subsequent delivery. The twins, Aquilla Edgar Wentworth and Priscilla Elizabeth Wentworth lived only two and three days. Elizabeth never fully recovered and died herself in September of that year.

I wouldn't know anything about the twins except for two letters that were found in my great grandfather's bible. He kept the letter James Wentworth wrote on February 7, 1889 telling about the birth and death of the twins and another one on September 28, 1889 telling about Elizabeth's death.

The first letter says the twins were born two months early and he thought they were well but Elizabeth was too sick to nurse or care for them and they did not survive.

I think they were buried with their mother, in the Holley Point Cemetery in Santa Rosa County but there is not a marker for any of them. There are a couple graves there that would fit the time period, with only a concrete cover. One is an adult and the other a child size grave.

My great grandparents named their next son after Aquilla but spelled it with an E. Marian Equilla Green was born on February 22, 1891.

The stars fell on

2011-11-19T19:54:00.001-06:00

I've never understood the Alabama license tag slogan. Is it something about a UFO sighting? This has nothing to do with those folks anyway.

I have been looking for a book written by W. T. Cash because I heard he included information about my Green family history. I think I first heard of it from one of my great aunts or maybe my father.

William Thomas Cash (1878-1951) grew up in Taylor County Florida and after working as a school teacher and then a short political career moved to Tallahassee, Florida where he got a job as the first State Librarian of Florida. When my wife worked at the State Library in 1981 she had a coworker, Dorothy Dodd, who had known and worked with him. Somewhere along the way I heard he had written about my family and so I have looked for his book for almost 30 years now.

The problem is that W. T. Cash was a prolific writer. He undoubtedly was the first blogger of Florida. He regularly wrote for several newspapers and also wrote many articles in the Florida Historical Quarterly. There are hundreds of his writings around. Many of his newspaper articles were short histories or remembrances of people he knew growing up. He also wrote several books, some in multiple volumes dealing with Florida history.

He was a childhood friend and contemporary of my grandfather, Millard Fillmore Green and later became close friends and a colleague of three of my grandfather's siblings who also worked as school teachers in Taylor County. One of them, Sylvester Green worked with Cash in Taylor County and later moved to Gainesville, Florida where he became a history professor at the University of Florida. Sylvester died in 1938 so I never knew anything about him until long after he was gone. I had been told that he researched the family history himself and was hoping he may have shared some of his findings with his friend W T Cash.

When my oldest daughter attended Florida State University I had her search the school library for W. T. Cash's books and I've bought a couple of them myself over the years when I found them available at used book stores. Unfortunately none of the books I could locate had any mention of my family.

Several months ago I received an email about a new book that put together many of his newspaper articles by the Taylor County Historical Society. I wrote to them and arranged to have a copy mailed to me.

The book does not have any comprehensive story of my family but does mention many of my relatives. It also tells of the stars falling in the late 1890s and a funny story about my grandfather.

In the article Cash called "The Old Time Religion" he said that he and Fillmore had been to the Bethpage community prayer meeting, to hear the circuit preacher in the 1890s.

He says as they were walking back to Fillmore's family home, "A meteor flashed across the sky making a dazzling light. Soon after we saw the light, there was a report like distant thunder and so far as we were concerned that ended that."

"On Friday night following there was a prayer meeting at a Mr. Jenkins' and during the testimony meeting following, a county Baptist preacher arose and testified that the Sunday night before he was overshadowed by a light so bright he could have read from his New Testament. In a low tone Fillmore remarked to me: "That d--d fool doesn't know that that was a star fell."

Got a pair?

2011-11-13T06:10:00.000-06:00

Is the chance of having twins inherited? Most people say fraternal twins can be inherited from the X Chromosome which means it comes from only the mother. If that's the case then it doesn't explain so many twins in my Fulford family. They happen when the Fulford connection is on the male or female side.

I did some research on twins in the family after a cousin, Pat in Florida asked me if there were other cases of twins. She had a daughter who had twins and she knew her grandmother also had twins.

I checked back a couple generations and found enough cases that it does seem to ask the question.

My grandfather's brother William Fulford was married to Julia Etta Quinn who had two sets of twins. One set died at birth and the other, Donald and Dorothy were born in Cortez, Florida in 1927.

William's daughter, Betty had twins Mark and Richard born in Charleston, SC in 1966.

One of William's great granddaughters had a set of twins Adam and

Audrey who were born in 2003.

Now that I think of it all three of these generations could have been passed on from the X chromosome they received from Julia Quinn Fulford. That would not explain these other cases.

My grandfather's sister, Dora Jane Fulford Adams had twins, Mabel and Barbara born in Cortez, Florida in 1926.

My grandfather's first cousin John David Fulford was married to Beatrice Elizabeth Roberts who had twins, Laura and Lula born in St Petersburg, Florida in 1933.

John's sister, Thelma Martha Fulford had twins Lorraine and Elaine born in Tampa, Florida in 1933

My uncle Gary's wife Pamela had twins, Jared and Julie born in Bradenton, Florida in 1979.

What's in a name?

2011-11-04T05:10:00.002-05:00

Doing family history research you often resort to google searches to find new information about a family line. An interesting part of google searches is using the image search page

I think it would be a good research project for some grad student to see how many mug shots turn up in the first 100 hits for various surnames and what that means.

If you search for my own name Green, adding a location like Florida you wouldn't see any because it gives so few photos of people in the results.

Search for a more unusual name like Ezell, the maiden name of my great great grandmother on my Dad's side and two out of the first 10 are offender photos.

Try it with some of the names in your family.

Romance on the Range

2011-10-30T06:57:00.005-05:00

I don't remember John Wayne having romantic scenes on any of his wagon train movies. Maybe they were there but we didn't notice.

My wife has a wagon train romance in her family history. Her great great grandparents met and fell in love on a wagon train from Saline County Missouri to Austin Texas in 1859.

Louisiana English Pennington was only 17 years old, riding in a wagon with her parents Simeon Dudley Pennington and Mary Jane Lynch Pennington when she met William Smith Telford. He had just finished a tour of duty in the US Army and was riding along with the wagon train on horseback.

He was five years older than Lou and according to a November 23, 1929 newspaper article in the Dallas Morning news he fell in love with her on the trip. They weren't married for another six years because he left to join the 4th (Bates) Regiment Texas Volunteers during the Civil War. After the war he came back to Austin and found Lou had waited for him.

They had twelve children and the second oldest was my wife's great grandmother Kate Augusta Telford Longacare.

The Metric System

2011-10-23T04:33:00.003-05:00

Probably like most of you, I never bought in to the metric system. I still use my 1965 -25th Anniversary Fulford Fish Company ruler when I need to measure something.

On Ancestry.com I noticed they have a new feature that finds people on other records for you automatically. They list them as 'suggested records" on the right side of the screen.

When you search for someone and then click on the record you found, they run a program in the background they call Ancestry Metrics. It looks for that same person, based on the name and date of birth and then automatically gives you a list of the other records.

This is a really wonderful addition to their service as you can literally find sometimes a half dozen records that are probably the person you are researching.

Bits n' Pieces

2011-10-10T03:07:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it can take years to find an answer to a simple question. My great great grandmother's second husband was Elijah Meadows Garner. Hope Foreman Adams married him on January 12, 1882 in Cartetet County after her first husband died. I have wondered what happened to them.

Hope was at least the 4th wife of Elijah. They moved to Manateee County Florida sometime in the late 1880s. Both their children were born in North Carolina and the family story is they both came down with TB after moving to Florida and died within weeks of each other. They said Hope died first and then her husband. Afterwards the children were adopted by Captain John Fogarty in Manatee County.

The problem is that there isn't anyone alive who would know the truth or who had even heard it 2nd hand. I had been trying to find some documentation of their death without any success for 10 years.

Then last week I received an email from the Manatee County Historical Records Librarian with the attached 3x5 card attached. It is an article from the Manatee River Journal dated August 11, 1892 and tells of the death of Elijah Garner the week before. I know it is him as his was the only Garner family in the Palma Sola area, and it only mentions his children surviving him.

So now that I know Hope and Elijah Garner died in the summer of 1892 maybe I can locate where they were buried.

Glenn Tartan

2011-10-09T06:44:00.000-05:00

My wife's mother was a Glenn before she married. A distant cousin was planning a trip to Scotland and asked if we wanted her to pick up some Glenn Tartan for us on her visit.

Frankly I didn't know what she was talking about and had to look it up to see if it was something to eat or wear. Apparently this is a big business in Scotland because there are a number of web pages you can use to look up your Tartan. I guess there are then any number of places to buy some of it on a roll or made into clothing.

With a name like Glenn you would assume the family came from Scotland. I looked back at the last known ancestor in the family and only have references to him coming from Ireland.

David Glenn 1745-1784 is found in many sources but they all say he came to the Colonies in the 1770s from Ireland. He settled in Newberry, South Carolina and served briefly during the Revolutionary War. He was given the rank of Colonel, and I'm not sure how. The Annals of Newberry, published in 1892 has a long account of his life and death.

I don't know much about the Scot - Irish history so it is possible the family had lived in Scotland before and moved to Ireland. Maybe some of you can explain it.

True Southern Greens

2011-10-01T08:22:00.000-05:00

I have a good friend who talks seriously of being buried in his backyard. Apparently it is perfectly legal in Tennessee and being a true southerner he feels it is his right.

While visiting relatives in Alabama recently I made a detour to find the graves of several distant relatives.

Judith Anthony married William Green in 1797 in Warren County North Carolina. They moved to Wilkes County Georgia where he died in 1805 leaving her a widow with several young children.

Two years later she married Robert Ware and moved to Montgomery, Alabama. They owned a large tract of land and operated a ferry over the Alabama river.

A couple blocks off Wares Ferry Road in Montgomery I found the Ware - Green family cemetery where Judith and several of her children and grandchildren are buried. The large monument is for Robert Ware, who was a Revolutionary War veteran.

The cemetery is in the back yard of some folks who didn't even know it was there when they bought the house. The cemetery had a lot of tall brush and it had been years since anyone tried to maintain it. I guess the realtor, if they knew it was there didn't consider a family cemetery as a selling feature so the buyers didn't know until they cleared the brush it was there.

To their credit they have taken over maintenance and it is now in very good condition.

Death comes quickly

2011-09-25T09:34:00.005-05:00

Lucretia Stokes was born in North Carolina and lived a long life. She was 72 yrs, 9 mos, and 11 days old when she died in 1814 in Lincoln County Georgia.

The last couple of those years must have been difficult. Her daughter, two sons and husband all died in less than two years.

Daughter Jane Stokes Ware, wife of Robert Ware died May 19, 1808. Husband William Stokes died December 12, 1810. Sons Richard Henry Stokes died June 03, 1812 and Thomas Stokes died on May 21, 1813.

They were all buried in the Stokes Family Cemetery off Jones Chapel Rd in rural Lincoln County.

I came across Jane Stokes doing research on my Green family. She was married to Robert Ware who later moved to Montgomery County AL. After Jane died he married Judith Anthony, the widow of William Green. I have matched a couple of her descendants on dna testing.

A nice find

2011-09-18T05:07:00.001-05:00

I was researching the Charles D. Jones family from Cortez, Florida recently and found they are related in a couple ways. Capt. Charles D Jones who was born in 1856 in Carteret County NC was married to Alice Adele Bishop who was the daughter of my 3rd cousin Asa Bishop from Alabama.

Charles Jone's brother, David Reid Jones was married to Sophronia Pigott Fulford who was the half sister of my great grandfather William Thomas Fulford.

Both of those finds were interesting but one that was better was finding a photo of James Gilbert Jones, the son of Charles and Alice taken in 1919.

Ancestry.com just put old passport applications online and one that James completed as a new Merchant Marine in 1919 was there. It included his application and statements from his parents and grandmother, Martha Ann Andress Bishop to document where and when he was born. On the back of the application was this photo. I doubt there are many if any photos of him from this period.

I don't know much about him. He was listed as a Merchant Marine on the 1930 census and a Cook on the Florida 1945 census. He died in 1976 and as far as I know he never married or had children. So this photo, from 90 years ago, may be the only one of him still around.

Cypress Lawn

2011-09-08T06:38:00.000-05:00

I have written several times about Captain William Hawkins Fulford, a distant cousin who settled what is now North Miami Beach, Florida just before the end of the 19th Century. I had researched him and his family for several years before proving the family connection. After Capt. Fulford died his wife moved to California to live with their son but she soon died herself.

Their only son was a glass salesman and as far as I know never had any children. He was married in 1888 to Mina Louise Norman in New York, NY but I don't know what happened to his wife. She disappeared after the 1910 census in California.

William Gilbert Fulford died on May 5, 1919 in San Francisco, CA just a couple years after his parents. I suspect he was interested in family history himself since he joined the Sons of the American Revolution.

I located the record of his death several years ago but only recently found a funeral home record that was put online as part of the collection at the Mormon Church web page Family Search.

According to the Halsted Funeral Home record he died of a heart attack in route to Harbor Hospital and was buried at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, in what is now San Mateo County CA. I wanted to close the loop on this family and also find out if his wife was buried next to him so I asked a Findagrave volunteer to take a photo of the grave marker. Unfortunately they couldn't find it.

The cemetery can't find a record of his burial and they say he was cremated and returned to the funeral home. The funeral home said he was buried in the cemetery. At that time, if his wife had already died and he had no children or relatives in the area then being cremated would make sense. If she was still alive then I would think he would have been buried. Of course, maybe he just wanted his ashes scattered in the Ocean. He grew up around the water and his family for several generations made their living on it.

John Green, where are you?

2011-09-01T06:59:00.001-05:00

My great great grandfather was named John Green. He was born about 1820 in South Carolina or was it North Carolina? The only record I have found of him was the 1860 census in Taylor County Florida.

It said he was born in South Carolina but his children on occasion said he was born in North. He didn't appear on the 1870 census and his wife, Sarah Strickland Green was shown as a widow.

He lived for a while in Georgia as his two older children were born there, but since the births were between the 1850-60 census I don't know if he was there in 1850 or not. I haven't found any John Green on the 1850 census that matched him.

Since he died between 1860 and 70 you would suspect it was connected to that widow maker we call the War Between the States. I found several John Greens who enlisted in either the CSA or Union Army from Florida but have slowly ruled them out.

The latest was one John Green who enlisted in the 2nd Florida Calvary of the Union Army. Several Taylor County men enlisted in the 2nd, including one of my other ancestors.

The record showed this John Green enlisted on April 16, 1864 at Fort Myers, Florida but died of disease on June 6, 1865. There was a record of a pension being claimed by his children but none of the records I found listed their names.

I hate having to pay for genealogy research. Some of my family would say it is because I am cheap. I would say it is because I hate to pay to obtain my history. If it is ours, I think we should have access.

In any event, after wondering about this for several years I decided to pay the money for a copy of the pension file. The National Archives charges a flat $25 for the basic file, which is just the application. The fee is higher for the complete correspondence file.

I requested this one online several months ago and just received it. It shows that John Green died of "chronic diarrhea" at the Cedar Keys, Florida hospital on June 6th. That would have to be a terrible death but probably no more than most of the other diseases that took many of the casualties of this war.

The pension application listed the name of his daughter, Florida Green and her date of birth as January 1, 1860. Her mother's maiden name is shown as Jane Houston. This is not my family but at least it answered the question and I can look elsewhere.

I looked for Jane and Florida Green on subsequent census records but didn't find them. I've put copies of the pension application here in case it helps someone else.

Killed in his prime

2011-08-28T08:02:00.002-05:00

My grandfather lost two brothers at a young age. His 25 year old brother Clyde Augustine Fulford died on October 26, 1918 after catching the flu during the infamous influenza epidemic of 1918. He was checking on his sister Dora's family in Tampa who were all sick when he caught it himself.

Their 21 year old brother Clayton Clarke Fulford died eleven moths later on September 29, 1919 in Cortez, Florida as a result of a gunshot wound. He and his wife Imogene were home alone and he was shot to death. Clayton had just made it through an overseas tour of duty in the Army during WWI.

The family story that has survived for 90 years is that his wife shot him. As far as I could find no charges were ever filed against her.

Imogene married another Cortez fisherman, Herman Sidney Guthrie ten years later. She and Sidney lived out their lives in Cortez for another 50 years.

A Mother's Wish

2011-08-20T19:55:00.000-05:00

I had a chance to look at the family bible of my great aunt, Freida King Wilson's grandparents recently.

Benjamin Franklin Olliff and his wife Mary Frances Wills Olliff lived in central Florida most of their life. They were married September 27, 1886 in Montclair, Florida and had an Orange grove in Citrus County.

They died in 1936 and 1937 in Hogan, Florida, now part of Jacksonville after moving there to be near their daughter Bessie Pauline Olliff King.

One page of the family bible listed the religious affiliations of their children. It shows the three surviving daughters were baptized into the Methodist Episcopal Church at Red Level, Florida on November 24, 1908.

Their son, John Benjamin Olliff joined the Baptist Church at Red Level, Florida on September 2, 1910. He was older than his sisters and I guess he made his own choice of church at age 22. The bible page showed his parents were members of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The last sentence on the page really says it all. "May our names all appear in the Lamb's Book of Life is the wish and prayer of Mother. Red Level, Florida September 5, 1911."

FTM 2011

2011-08-15T20:54:00.002-05:00

I've been using Family Tree Maker software for at least 10 years maybe more.

I installed the 2011 version about a month ago because I was having problems with my data file in the old version of FTM 16 I had used for several years. The data file was becoming corrupted every week or so which meant I was losing data and was constantly having to reinstall a backup file.

The new version has the ability to upload your data file to Ancestry and then download it direct from within the software. This is supposed to compact the file and fix errors. Well I can say the new version works and is worth the trouble to upgrade. My old data file was large, 142 mb but the new file is only 95 mb.

It makes everything run faster and I haven't had any data crashes since the first week.

The software also has a feature that automatically searches ancestry.com or the Internet via google for anyone in your file that you highlight. So you get a list of census records or whatever that list that person without having to search. This will definitely speed up entering data and finding documented sources.

The menu is more complicated than the old one but all in all it is a worthwhile update.