Mam-ma's Southern Family

My mother lived with her parents in the 1940s and 1950s in Walnut Creek, California until she was a junior in high school, and then they moved to a house they purchased in Pleasant Hill. Both communities were rural or small-town in nature. There were local shops to purchase goods but no large department stores. Perhaps Sears or JC Penney had catalog stores where one could order something.  So if you wanted to do shopping in larger department stores, you had to drive or ride the bus into Oakland or San Francisco. Oakland had an H.C. Capwell and a Sears Roebuck store, plus many other fine shops along Broadway and Telegraph. It is likely that my mother and her mother traveled into Oakland on the Greyhound bus and shopped in the stores. It would have been a big deal, one where you put on your best clothes because you were going into the city. How do I know this? We have in our collection a photograph of my mother and grandmother walking down Broadway near the Paramount Theater. From th...

I currently have four people in my genealogy database named Hazel Loveless. Three are men, all born before 1820, and one is a woman, born in 1914. I wonder about the popularity of the name in the 1700s. I decided to search the 1800 U.S. census on just the first name of Hazel. I got sixteen hits, with half having spelling variations. My ancestor’s brother, Hazel Loveless, b. about 1770, turned up in Newberry District, South Carolina.  Others were found in New York, Vermont, Maryland, Connecticut, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. I thought it was a southern thing to name boys Hazel. Census Year No. with Hazel as First Name 1810 26 1820 33 1830 66* [1] 1840 84* My Hazels Hazel Loveless was born about 1770. He was an older brother of my maternal 4x-great-grandfather, James Loveless, who was born about 1771. Both may have been born in North Carolina or South Carolina, b...