Mam-ma's Southern Family

This is my third 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 daughters are still here visiting, so I have found a previously written blog post that fits this theme about maps and my ancestor’s communities. https://mam-massouthernfamily.blogspot.com/2016/12/where-did-my-ancestors-live-communities.html Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, Mam-ma's Southern Family, All rights reserved.

It's  Saturday  Night – Time for more  Genealogy Fun! Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing is to: 1) Did you or your children know their great-grandparents?   2) Tell us in your own blog post, or in comments to this post, or in comments on Facebook.  As always, please leave a link to your work in Comments.    My response: My daughters knew only one of my grandparents. My maternal grandmother, Pansy Louise (Lancaster) Johnston lived until just over a month short of 100 years. That really increased the chance of my children to have known her. I had both of my children at a later age (mid-thirties), while my grandmother had my mother at age 20 and my mother had me at age 20. If I had had a child at twenty and my daughter also at 20, we might have had five generations living at the same time. I have a photo of four generations: my grandmother, my mother, myself, and my first daughter, taken on her bapt...

This past week I attended the Midwest African American Genealogy Institute (MAAGI for short) that was originally scheduled for three days of instruction at the Allen County Public Library (ACPL) but because of Covid-19, was scheduled online. This gave me the opportunity to attend. Check out their website for next year’s courses. Just $50 can reserve you spot! I took Track IB: Methods & Strategies for Slavery Era Research , coordinated by Dr. Shelley Murphy. We had these wonderful instructors: Nicka Sewell-Smith “Systems to Track and Document Enslaved Populations.” Excel or Google Sheets is your friend in keeping track of all of the data about the enslaved and enslavers, plus keeping track of DNA matches. “No Stone Unturned: Case Studies in Identifying the Last Slaveholder.” Surnames are not always an indicator of last enslaver. It was seeing her success stories. “Case Studies in Gray: Identifying Shared Ancestries Thru DNA.” Lots more use of online DNA sites a...

This is my third 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. Tom & Pansy - 1930s My grandfather, Tom J. Johnston, Jr. was from Gustine in Comanche County, Texas. He met my grandmother, Pansy Louise Lancaster in her hometown of Stephenville in Erath County, Texas. My mother, Lela Nell, was born in Stephenville in 1934. So, when were my grandparents married? In my early days of doing genealogy, I never got the marriage date for my grandparents. I had their birth dates and places, but not their marriage. They didn’t seem to celebrate their anniversary, at least not publicly, so I didn’t know it by that way either. My sisters speculated that perhaps they had to get married, due to the upcoming birth of their child, Lela Nell. Perhaps that was why they di...

This is my third 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. For the theme of “uncertain,” I decided to find a female with no maiden name, or at least an uncertain maiden name. This blog post will review what I know about Rebecca, wife of David Ro(d)gers and mother of Eliza Ro(d)gers, who married Ebenezer Loveless in 1871. Through the process, I will be creating a plan for future research. I will start with what I know about her daughter, Eliza. I am also going to standardize the spelling of the surname to RODGERS for simplicity. Chattooga County, Georgia I first wrote about Eliza in this blog post . At the time I was trying to verify her parents’ names. Eliza Rodgers was born May 1854 in South Carolina. [1] She first appeared in the 1860 population census in ...

This is my third 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 grandparents, Tom J. Johnston and Pansy Louise (Lancaster) Johnston, purchased a house in Pleasant Hill, California, in a housing tract called “Gregory Gardens.” I am not sure, but this may have been their first property purchased in California. 307 Nancy Lane, my grandfather & his jeep A copy of the deed and title insurance papers were stuffed in a 1950’s County Recorder envelope with a 3 cent stamp. The deed was from the Contra Costa County Title Company with filing stamps and original signatures on it. They purchased the house from the Hergan, Inc. as joint tenants and the property was described as: Lot 22, as designated on the map entitled, “Gregory Gardens, Unit No. 1, Contra Costa...

This is my third 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. Land Grants I found that Daniel Coor of Sampson County, North Carolina, obtained a land grant on 10 July 1788. [1] He had entered on the 10 May 1787 and it was surveyed on 20 May 1787. This piece of land was located on the east side of Little Cohara. The land description of the fifty-seven acres is as follows: “Beginning at his own corner, a Maple and runs along his line S75E 124 poles to his other corner, a pine, thence his other line S15W 127 poles to his corner a white oak, thence S75E 26 poles to a white oake, thence N15E 167 poles to a pine, thence N 75 W 153 poles to a pine, thence to the beginning.” To learn more about the land grant process, see “North Carolina land grant procedure 1777...