Bill worked late for Sharkey February 16th, 2013
Just that small sentence shouldn’t mean much to anyone other than a genealogist. To a genealogist it’s a clue into the life of an ancestor. For me, it wouldn’t have meant much without the document I am about to share with you. Before this document, I would have noted that my great-grandpa William L Moore once worked for a Mr. Sharkey but that would have been it. With the document I have though, I know that Mr. Sharkey must have been more than an employer. He was most likely a very supportive mentor and friend.
I first shared this resume in 2010, but now that I’ve spent this long transcribing Llewellyn’s diary, this document has a much richer meaning. It might be hard to see in the gallery format, so feel free to click over to the original shared images here.
What the resume shows is that in July of 1922, when William was just 20 years old, he started working for H.W. Sharkey, C.P.A. as an Assistant Stenographer. This is a big deal because what we know without looking at the resume is that my Great-Grandpa spent over 30 years working for AT&T as an accountant. Unfortunately, the resume also shows that there just wasn’t enough work to keep my Great-Grandpa on and in December of 1923 he left. Great-Grandpa spent about two weeks working as a bookkeeper for the British International Corporation before he went back to work for H.W. Sharkey & Co. This time as a Semi-Senior Accountant or Assitant, I can’t tell. What I do know is he got himself a $5 raise! He must have proven by leaving that he was vital to the business!
The resume says that my Great-Grandpa was only with H.W. Sharkey & Co. for four months before leaving in April of 1924. You and I know differently though because on February 16, 1925, he worked late for Sharkey. I would say that it was an error on the resume, but I know my Great-Grandpa’s record keeping skills. That just wouldn’t happen. So I choose to believe he worked for Sharkey while he went to the Excelsior Business School (see what I did there using the resume!). Then on May 15, 1925 he finally went to work where he would stay for the rest of his professional career, AT&T. Which is where I am 100% positive he was when this series of pictures was taken.
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Hard at Work or Hardly Working? You decide! February 15th, 2013
As I continue to work on my long enduring family file cleanup, I find small ways to amuse myself. Also, I rewrote that sentence three times. Once in my head, twice by typing. Anyway, today I was really amused as I was adding more census information into Family Tree Maker 2012. I’m making a really big effort to make all my sources Evidence Explained Style. Though I’m not exactly keeping a ruler around to slap my own knuckles. I’ve been basically looking up each source in my copy of the book, then emulating how I think the source will come out. I’ve also tried to make sure I use the pre-made templates in the software, so that my source citation will be as close as possible.
With the cryptic, rambling explanation out of the way, I’ll show you the source of my amusement today. P.S. I rewrote that sentence twice.
click for full size
What you see above is a screenshot of my working file. I was working on the husband of one of my Taylor ancestors. I had added his 1940 census information and proceeded to the source screen to add his citation into the bunch. I doubt you can really see without looking at the full size picture, but the sheer amount of multiple entries had me laughing to myself! For some reason, seeing all those legitimate entries for the same census districts cracked me up! That is just the 1940 census. By 1940 my Taylors had already started to disband a little bit. However, every single Bracken County entry above is a Taylor connection. Then when you take a look at Johnsville specifically, there are 13 different families within the first 10 pages of that district.
On a somewhat similar note, I love the look of all those uniform source citations! It really helps my OCD calm down a little bit!
Checking In, Still Hard at Work February 13th, 2013
I’m not completely scrapping the website redesign. However, I’m not sure how I’m going to proceed. I feel like I might have overwhelmed myself by trying to write a tutorial for something that I didn’t feel comfortable “teaching”. So the design is going to happen, the only thing I’m not sure of is how I’m going to finish up my redesigning my chaos series. To be honest, the TNG portion of it is already just about done anyway. I think when people ask me about my custom design, they don’t realize how custom it actually is. While yes, I can just tweak a template to make it look like my own, I much prefer to start with the blank slate and really make it my own. Not everyone is comfortable doing that, which is fine, I just don’t know if I feel comfortable teaching my method anymore. If you hadn’t noticed, I have a bit of a confidence problem!
I am exactly one month away from my three year blogiversary! So most of my energy for genealogy is spent on working on my newest, short term goal! There are a ton of Taylors to get through yet, but I’m working steadily on them. Hopefully, when March 13th comes around I’ll be able to say I’ve been successful! Funny enough the Taylor family I’m currently working with actually lived right near where my Grandma’s second husband Wayne, was born and raised. After they got married, Wayne purchased his childhood home and they moved there. Actually I’m only 80% sure of the childhood home part. I’m sure that’s what someone told me though. It could just be the town, not the house.
I thought it was really crazy to find them here, but then when I looked at a map, it wasn’t that out of the sphere of possibility.
When I actually looked at the wider picture, I realized that the huge city of Cincinnati was actually what spurred my family to spread out. What I’ve learned about the migration of my family was that as it got to be the 1920s and 1930s, the world was changing. Cars were being mass produced, which means people could go longer distances quicker and easier. No doubt a lot of the farm kids decided to try their hand at the big city. I’ve found a lot of the younger sons would move to the city and find jobs working for schools, electric companies, and other “city jobs”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still finding farmers, plenty of farmers. It is pretty interesting when I see how many farmers were in the family. It makes me want to take property records and color in all the farm land my family owned and see how colorful a map can get! That could be a fun project some day.
Smaller goals work better for me February 1st, 2013
One of the things I constantly beat myself up about is that I don’t really keep up with my genealogy resolutions each year. I’m going to try something a little new, a little smaller. I tend to take on too much and then get overwhelmed. It’s time to change my patterns and see if I can’t find a more productive way of getting things done. The way I’m going to try and do this is to think outside the box. I’m no longer going to think in terms of multiple monthly or yearly goals. I’ve got to start focusing on just one thing at a time.
The first goal I’m going to work to complete, is actually a month long goal but there is a reason! My 3rd blogiversary is coming up on March 13th. So that’s my deadline date.
Feb 2012 Pedigree – done through Hannah Carter.
In the year since I last showed my pedigree (I think), I’ve added a ton of information into my tree. I’ve gone from 1031 sourced individuals to 2276! Though some of those might not be sourced yet. I learned with the large Taylor families, it was more productive to add in all the children of a couple and proceed from there. So there are probably a few un-sourced children in there… No I won’t say un-sourced, they all have the source citation for my Taylor Family Tree Outline where I’ve gotten the names. Luckily for me Ancestry.com has a ton of Kentucky Vital Records online. So it’s really easy to make sure that I’ve got good names and dates.
2013 Pedigree
Onto the blogiversary goal. While I want to promise I’ll have a brand spankin’ new site design, I’m not stupid enough to promise that! Learned my lesson! Between February 2012 and February 2013, I finished work through 4 more of my 3rd Great Grandparents. Hopefully, if I work hard I will get the final two that will finish up the Taylor line of my tree. Not that there’s much information on that Applegate line to enter, but I’ve done that one all by myself without the aid of a big written out tree like some of the rest!
Once I’ve gotten this goal finished, I’ll focus on a new one!
What went wrong with my Numbering System? January 31st, 2013
It’s no coincidence that right before my genealogy hiatus, a traumatic event happened during my file cleanup project. The main objective of the cleanup project was to finally have an organized, sourced core family tree to work from. The project has been going on for three years now.
Well into the project, I finally got a nice pace going. I also finally had an organization method that was “synced” between Family Tree Maker 2012, RootsMagic, and my moore-mays.org database. Basically, I would enter a person into RootsMagic since the program automatically assigns a number to a person, and as far as I know, there is no way to change it. Then I would use that number as a Person ID in Family Tree Maker and the website. I would also label all my digital files with the same number. So that I could always refer to one number for each ancestor. It was a beautiful system that worked beautifully!
Then it happened.
Basically, I was doing some ScotlandsPeople data entry, when I happened to notice that the numbers in my programs were… off. Now there is no doubt in my mind I did something here. The Roots Magic program didn’t do this without me doing something. I was messing around with the file in the week or so before I noticed what had happened. Most likely I was playing around with the software and did something.
If I’m being completely upfront, I most likely even …. merged a Gedcom into the file. Which kind of explains that. To put it into a timeline, this happened right before my “hiatus”. It was right before the holidays and I was also helping to plan a party at the time. Things were obviously the perfect storm of procrastination I needed at the time.
After the holidays, I took some time and decided it was time to get back to work. Broken resolutions be damned I was going to get back to it. About 5 minutes in, I had a genealogy diva fit and posted this to my twitter account.
Again, I’ve never been more sure of my decision to name this blog the Misadventures of a Genealogist. Except maybe my sub-headline should be “If it ain’t broke, give me a minute.”
Now that I’m feeling more my age, I’m able to look at the “traumatic” issue with saner eyes.
It wasn’t until I decided to take a deep breath and go through my backups that I found my salvation. I realized I had an “extra” Roots Magic file in my Family file directory. THANK YOU GENEALOGY KARMA.
“Extra” Genealogy file
It turns out that before I did whatever it was I did, I created a new file. Since I usually just close my program and not the file, it automatically brought up the “play file” the next time I opened it up.
I’m not completely out of the woods, it’s completely possible I lost some progress before I realized what was going on between the two files. The great news is that I wasted 3 months thinking I had a horrible, tragic, traumatic event happen and I actually didn’t have it.
I know, I’m weird, but you got to look on the bright side of life. It could have been true, and I could have not had an extra file to use.
Whew. That was close.
