Organizing

I've been following DearMYRTLE's checklist on getting organized. If you need to get organized and don't know where to begin, this checklist is for you!!!

Part of the checklist was to get the items for your office that you wanted. I've always wanted a 2 drawer filing cabinet. Office Depot just happened to have this one on sale. It perfectly matches my desk (that my mom found at a thrift store for $20!!). It also subs as a nightstand for the other side of my bed.

I also started on the Family Search Indexing project and indexed 50 records. Trying to pay my genealogical dues in a way. It's very easy! If you're good at data entry, you'll be excellent at this.

Also, I will be attending the Black Family History Day in Morrow, GA. As this is my first genealogy related trip, I'm extremely excited. Also, I will be getting my copy of Mississippi to Africa signed by the author, Melvin J. Collier!!

The week after this trip, I'm taking another relatively short genealogy/family trip to Elizabeth City. I'll get there on Friday with just enough time to do some research at the county office!!! With only one day to do official research, I will have to make sure I write a to do list for myself so I don't forget anything. Any ideas?

Late Memes

I'm late as all get out with Memes. But it doesn't mean I'm any less appreciative about receiving them.

George Geder and Genealogy Traces honored me with the Proximidade Award. The Proximidade blog award details are as follows:

"These blogs invest and believe in PROXIMITY - nearness in space, time and relationships! These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers!

Deliver this award to eight bloggers, who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award."

I've added the award to my sidebar. As a recipient, I'm supposed to nominate 8 fellow bloggers. But, all my fellow bloggers have been nominated once or twice before..plus I'm late with this.

So, I'll say..THANK YOU!!!

Also, thank you to Msteri who tagged me for an award several months ago....sorry I didn't get a chance to work on it..

New Years Resolutions...

I had the beginning of a blog post started earlier at work. But my attempts to email it to myself at home, caused me to accidentally delete it...DARNIT!! So now, I'm going to make the attempt to recreate it off of memory...oh boy.

Every year I make the attempt to make a resolution I think I can stick too. This year is no different. However, I think this years resolutions will be achievable. Because, I know you're dying to know, I'll list them for you.

• Start taking the home study course from NGS. I want to start doing my genealogy research correctly to insure my information is accurate. Maybe one day, I'll become certified.
• Research Trips. I'm planning to take one in a few months to NC to take pictures of the cemetery on Mill Pond Road.
• Treat my genealogy and family unity projects as a career. A career being different than a job of course. Career is something you want to do. A job is what you do to get by.
  
• Get more into promoting my blog. I love the fact that I can do a search for 'Spence Lowry' on Google and Yahoo and my blog is the first to pop up.
  
• Get organized. (Thanks to Msteri for the link) My records are some of everywhere and I have no real organization. More like, 'I know where it is' organized.
• Post to my blog more constantly. The past few months I got caught up with doing a family reunion letter and creating a database for the family, that I let the genealogy slide a bit. I'm getting back on that horse soon!\
• Possibly graduate my blog to a Wordpress blog. I've noticed alot of people with wordpress blogs and I love what they can do with them. I have a domain name, I just need to look into it a little bit more.
  

Home related resolutions.

• Only buy the foods I really plan on cooking. So many times I end up with meat in the freezer that eventually gets thrown out due to freezer burn. From now on, I will cook everything before I buy new. I think I'll save more money that way.
  
• Get organized. Yeah...home is a tad unorganized....still on the philosophy of 'I know where it is'. I need to do better!
• Pay off bills.
  
• Eat healthy. Hopefully lose weight. But seriously eat healthier.
  
• um...that's about it.
  

I know I had more, but my memory sucks right now!!!

Life has settled….

….a little. Life changes constantly whether you want it to or not. Since my last post, I have moved, maintaining our family database, started working on scanning pictures, maintaining the family website and generally keeping busy.

The life changing event is the move. Don’t really want to elaborate but, I believe everything happens for a reason.

Now that I seem to have a little more time on my hands, and the projects are well on their way, I can get back into my research. I took a few months off because I was feverishly trying to get our first family newsletter out (Cousin Connections) by the first of December. Mission accomplished! With the help of family members on input and editing, the newsletter went out and the feedback has been great! The next issue is scheduled for March 2009.

We also have an ISSN. For those of you who don’t know, an ISSN is a unique 8-digit number used to identify print or electronic periodical publications. The benefit of having this is, our newsletter will be available for generations to come.

I may have created enough buzz with the family that they have started looking for the cemetery off of Mill Pond road. Heard it thru the grapevine, that some family members have actually taken pictures of some headstones at other cemeteries. I’m excited and hope to see those soon.

Thanks to Wendy who tagged me. I didn’t get a chance to complete it, but I appreciate being tagged and that I was still thought of during my hiatus!!

I plan on taking a research trip in February (depending on the weather) to Elizabeth City. This will be my first one and I'm excited about doing hands on research. Maybe I can find the court records that put my 2nd great grandmother, Cora Spence, in jail.

I don't want you to think that I disappeared. I'm still here and will be in genealogy mode full force come the beginning of the year.

Hiatus

With writing a newsletter and the holidays coming up, I hadn't had much time for research. I also hadn't had that urge to focus on anyone particular for a while. Maybe my ancestors are busy too. I don't feeling them guiding me towards an ancestor, but I do feel them guiding me towards unity.

See, with my family, we have had a separation for far to long. For reasons unknown to me, Spence-Lowry family has been a bit divided. This is my own opinion. My family may not agree, however it does appear that way. So, my quest has been to try to unite my family. The 2 sisters that married 2 brothers.

Usually our family reunion consists mostly of 1 sister and brother's family. The Bessie and Ed side. However on the Rosa and Enoch side, very few come to the reunion. I can understand why. But, I'm not going to air that on here. But, what I want for the coming years is for both sides of the family to feel connected. I don't want one side to feel more or less important than the other. There is a reason why we call it the Spence-Lowry family. Because it's the 2 sisters that married the 2 brothers. We are strongly connected and we should remain that way.

Contacting the Living

Since my family reunion, I haven’t done much genealogy research. With economic stresses in my life, my mind hadn’t been too focused on genealogy. However, it has been focused on family.

I started a family newsletter. The first one will be sent out in December 2008. I’ve requested an ISSN for the newsletter so the Library of Congress will keep each issue on record. I figure future generations will have something to look back on.

I have also been contacting the living. We have a large family but we barely know each other. More importantly, we barely see each other. There are cousins that I have never seen. Well, these past few weeks, I have been calling those family members. Of course, every phone call begins with “Hi, this is A. Spence, I’m the great granddaughter of Bessie” just so they know who I am.

I’m so glad that I have done this. In the beginning I truly thought that I was going to have resistance to the phone calls and questions. But, everyone that I called has been forthcoming with information. Not only that, they have been so giving with other ‘living’ family members #’s and addresses. Everyone seems to love the idea of uniting the family and hopefully in the coming years, well the most distant of cousins coming to the reunions.

But, I believe the happiest thing was finding out that I have a cousin in FL. All these years, thinking that my family and my uncle’s family were the only ones in FL, I learned that I have a 3rd cousin living about 4 hours from me. She doesn’t know me and I don’t know her but we talked for a while last night.

I'm still here!

Hello,

I haven't blogged in a while but I wanted to let you know that I'm still here. I've been a little stressed about my job lately due to the current market. My company was bought by another and I won't know the status of my position until December 1st.

So, with that, I haven't had the push to do research although I feel my ancestors invading my daily thoughts about it.

Anywho, just wanted to say HELLO and I'm still here.

Changing my Surname

I have been debating with this issue for some time. My fiancé and I intend on getting married in the near future. However, I haven’t decided whether or not to take his last name.

I have lived with mine for 30 years. Why change it because of marriage? Granted I do like the nostalgia of it, however, I don’t want my path lost. I am a Spence and do I really want to change my name to someone else’s surname? What about mine? Is my surname so unimportant that I have to get rid of it? I don’t belong to him. Marriage is such a partnership but most of the time, women is expecting to take on his last name. Let me stop before I get on my feminist soap box.

I didn’t have the foresight of giving my children my surname when they were born. I wish I had. However, they do have an Ethiopian middle name that will be my families naming tradition.

Back to the subject.

What do you think? Should a woman change her name to her husbands upon marriage?

I heart you too!

YAH!!!!! I love being linked on blogs but to top that off, Msteri at Heritage Happens nominated me for the “I heart your blog”! Thank you Thank you Thank you. When I started this a few months ago, my goal was to saturate the internet with Spence-Lowry information. I’m glad to make some GF’s (Genealogy Friends) along the way.

Now for the rules.

The rules associated with this tag are as follows:

1. Can put the logo on his/her blog
2. Must link to the person who gave the award
3. Must nominate 7 other blogs and link to them
4. Must leave a comment on each of the nominated blogs

And the 7 blogs are:

Our Georgia Roots by Mechie
George Geder
Sasha’s Roots by Sasha

Geneablogie by Craig
All My Branches by Wendy

AnceStories by Miriam

Roots Reading

Back Track

Thanks for this nomination, I will wear it proudly on my blog chest!!!!

Now, I'm off to let the others know I heart them too.

OMG!!!!

Oh My Genealogy!!!!!!!!

Mechie once told me to “the Ancestors are assisting us” and George Geder always ends his posts and comments with “Guided by the Ancestors”. Unless you research your family tree, you won’t understand this. However, those of us who are can feel themselves being lead in a certain direction.

Yesterday, while going thru my spreadsheet of ancestors, I stopped at Martha Lowry (B: 1899, D: 1916). She was only 16 when she died and I had already looked at her death certificate. The cause of death was unknown and the informant was James Armstrong, not her parents, which I thought was odd. Martha is the sister of the 2 sisters that married 2 brothers. However, yesterday I looked at the death certificate again and noticed something that I didn’t see before.

Place of Burial: Mill Pond Ground.

How did I miss this earlier?!?!?!?!?!?! Could this be the Hinton Burial Ground that has been eluding me for the past year?!?!

I have asked SEVERAL family members that live in Pasquotank and no one knows about the Hinton Burial Ground. However, after speaking to my dad about this one day, he did mention about a burial ground down the street from my great grandmothers house (Mill Pond Road). The same street several of my relatives have lived for YEARS! So, in recent days, I have asked several family members about burial grounds on Mill Pond Road. Low and behold, several family members remember a burial ground off a dirt road about 1 mile down the street.

I got chill bumps yesterday when I spoke with one of my cousins about it and he confirmed. If this is the Hinton Burial Ground, it’s an important piece of our family. The parents of our Spence-Lowry connection are buried here. Typing this is giving me chills!!!!!

I got chill bumps this morning when I spoke with my Cuz Tina and told me what her father said. “My father said that there is a cemetery on Mill Pond road. It's at the end of the road.”

The hairs on my arms stood up for at least 2 minutes. I just kept thinking this must be it!!!!!

My dad is going to Pasquotank this weekend for a funeral. I’ve asked him to see if he could find this burial ground and take a picture.

If it is still there, I intend to make it my mission to get this restored.

*Update- I went back and looked at other siblings of Martha Lowry an found a sister of that was buried at Mill Pond Burial Ground also.*


**Update again-I was clicking on the Pasquotank County NC Gen Web site and then clicked on the Pasquotank County Government link. Wouldn't you know, the county is trying to identify these unknown cemeteries!! I think I found mine.**



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