Mam-ma's Southern Family

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. My first trip to a county courthouse was in Stephenville, Erath County, Texas. It was at the beginning of my genealogy research experience and I was not very careful about where I obtained information or what was the best method to use. I had made the trip to Stephenville with my grandmother, Pansy Louise (Lancaster) Johnston, whom I called Mam-ma, in order to visit the places in town where my mother, who had passed away three years before, grew up. We stayed with her brother, R.D. and sister-in-law, Barbara Lancaster, who lived outside of town. R.D. drove Mam-ma and me all around Stephenville, with me sitting in the back seat. It was not the best place to see where you were going. Looking out the

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's Saturday Night again - time for  some more Genealogy Fun !! Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing is to: 1)  One of our family stories for our descendants should be how we met our spouse.  Another one should be, if we know it, how did our parents meet each other? 2)  This week, let's tell our "parents meeting" story if we know it.  If you don't know that story, tell us another one about one of your relatives meeting their spouse or significant other. 3)  Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a comment on this blog post to lead us to your answers. Way back in October 2015, we wrote about this same subject. My post from then is here . Instead, I’ll write about how my grandparents met.  Pansy Louise Lancaster and Tom J Johnston were married on 15 December 1933 by the Comanche County, Texas, Justice of the Peace. [1] Tom got the lic

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. I have surnames that begin with Love: Love, Lovelace, and Loveless. When I first began to do research, my grandmother told me her mother’s name was Lela Ann Loveless. “The LOVELESS, not the one ending in LACE.” So I dutifully began looking for Loveless surnames in census and other records. It didn’t take long to discover that the surname could be spelled many ways. Besides Loveless and Lovelace, I found Lovelass, Lovless, Lovelis, and other variations. So what I learned was spelling doesn’t count. Early recorders of information wrote what they heard and didn’t bother about the “proper” way to spell a name. Maybe even the Loveless ancestor didn’t know how to spell their own name. Where did this nam