I can’t help myself. I have to chart out all those children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Reuben and Anna Webb. See yesterday’s post for the catalyst to this list. For those that aren’t me and aren’t familiar with the way my family tree works. The Webb family is on my mother’s side of the family. My maternal grandmother’s to be exact. This family has been for the most part verified by me because for some reason I love the Webb family. Reuben’s family is actually all researched by me, so that’s why I’m so anxious to pinpoint all these kids. The hard part is not counting the kids born AFTER my 1905 target date for the article written and not counting children that had passed away before 1905.

Reuben Thompson Webb married Anna Sidwell 16 May 1835 in Brown County, Ohio ¹.

Living Descendants in 1905

Okay, I did leave in all 6 of Reuben and Anna’s children. Elizabeth died in infancy and I think James died after or during the Civil War. In all, I’m really surprised how off I am! This shows that you shouldn’t be too confident just by using census records! I had a few marriage indexes to help at the time but most of this research was done in the early stages of my genealogy. So really I’m anxious to see what else I could unearth now! I’m going to have to make time for that this weekend or during the week sometime!

I like to keep things honest on this blog. So I have to tell you, I haven’t touched my genealogy since at least Sunday. I did index some records for FamilySearch during Glee this week, but that was about all I did in the genealogical sense. I also haven’t gotten any further on getting my WordPress design done. I’m about to the point where I’m going to have to call relatives for a bit of a pep talk. Low self confidence never helps these situations. I’ve been putting it off way too long!

I did have a comment on my last entry that was caught in my SPAM filter. I have both Akismet and a CAPTCHA image running though so it might not be SPAM. The poster said they were trying to view my blog on an iPad and it wasn’t working. So if any technology advanced people who have an iPad can let me know if this is a problem, I’ll try and fix it with the new design! It could just be that the iPad is like all those web browsers, it just doesn’t display proper coding like it should. Firefox and Opera are the only browsers I’ve seen that are most consistent when it comes to displaying code properly.

That’s not why I’m writing today though. I’m writing to inform you of alternative methods to finding genealogy records. A few years back (I can’t remember when), someone came across my family tree on Ancestry or this website (Can’t remember that either! Eek!). They said they had “found an eBay auction” they thought I’d be interested in. According to said auction, it was from an estate sale. At the time of the email, I wasn’t very good at checking my email regularly, so I was late for the auction. I did something I don’t regret though. I saved the preview pictures used in the auction.

Article for Reuben T and Anna Webb

After reading the parts of the article I could see, I can place the article around 1905. Unfortunately Anna died in 1906. My only headache is trying to place their 4 children, 27 grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren, and 3 great-great-grandchildren. Oy! I have to make a chart for that I think! I’ve kept these images on my hard drive in a special folder since that day. Reuben is the brother of my 3rd Great Grandfather, George Washington Webb. They are two of the “orphans” mentioned in the little blurb at the beginning of my Grandma’s family tree. Also in this group of estate records were some Civil War records.

Discharge Paper for James A Webb

What’s great about this is even though I don’t have these records in my personal arsenal. I did learn something from them. Now I know there was a reason Reuben’s son disappeared after the 1860 census. Of course I suspected, but suspecting isn’t proof. The thing I’ve learned about the Webbs are that they were very involved in the Civil War. Reuben’s brother James F Webb allegedly died from wounds he sustained in the War. Reuben himself lost an eye and now it seems as if Reuben’s son was also in the war. You can bet that as soon as Footnote.com has the Indiana and Ohio service records up, I’ll be disappearing into them for awhile. I have found Reuben and his son in indexes but I’m so anxious to see actual records!

You want to know something eerie about my Webb family though? While I was going through the boxes of things from my Great Grandma Llewellyn (Dad’s side), I found a little booklet. In that booklet there was an advertisement for some kind of headache powder. In this add it had a testimonial from Mrs. Reuben T Webb of Tippecanoe County, Indiana. She endorsed the product with great passion as it relieved her very severe headaches! How crazy to think my Mom and Dad’s family had a LOST moment of path crossing!

These images are not mine. They were used to advertise an eBay auction years ago. I have no rights to these images and I am making no money off them. These images are in no way a source of documentation for my tree because I haven’t set my eyes on them. This entry is really to show how desperation for new information can lead to you saving images from anywhere, including expired eBay auction pages. I don’t condone or endorse this activity. I have no affiliation with eBay. I make no money from eBay. I didn’t even buy these records on eBay. I have no affiliation with the television shows LOST or Glee. Except that I love them. Don’t you love having fun disclaimer messages? I sure do. I can’t mention fluffy pajamas in this one though because it’s 1:30 in the afternoon and I am not in my pajamas… unfortunately.

The last week, I’ve been slowly entering my mother’s side of the family into my new family file. It’s a little slower going because there are more of them than Dad’s side. I also had a master list of birthdays I made at the family reunion last year for Dad’s side. So I was able to put them in quickly and use the source I titled, “2009 Family Reunion Master List”. I’m new to citing Personal Family sources, so I was a bit baffled at first on how to really cite it. Then I realized I was once again over-analyzing something. So I gave the title as stated above, I’m listed as the other, and in the description I wrote that I compiled the list by going around to everyone at the family reunion and getting their birth dates and marriage dates where needed. It turned out to be a big project for me that year!

On my Mom’s side I now have the original copy of the Family Tree. This is the one my Grandma brought when I was in the eighth grade. I ended up photocopying it at my Mom’s work, and I later reproduced it in Excel and re-printed it. In that time though, I think I might have tried to “fix” it. I think things got a little turned around. I’ve decided to no longer use my photocopy version. I am lucky that my Aunt sent Grandma’s copy to Maryland for me.

Taylor-Webb Family Tree. This has been missing the letters for as long as I can remember!

This has the most complete list I’ve ever seen of the current Taylor family. I don’t communicate much with this side of the family so I don’t know if I would ever had completed this much of it without Grandma’s tree.

Taylor-Webb Family Tree. Page 2A.

It’s a great resource for quite a few generations  back. If you can see, Reuben Vincent Webb is listed as Family Member 2-1 in this tree. This tree counts forward from the earliest known Webb relative. So Reuben is actually my 2nd Great Grand Uncle. It’s his sister Mollie Jane Webb who marries into the Taylor family. My index number in this tree is listed as 6-54. Just to show you how it counts forward in time.

Taylor-Webb Family Tree

What my photocopy version was missing is what you see above. I was in 8th grade around 1997. My Grandmother didn’t pass away until January 2005. So in that time, not only had I been making changes to the family tree, so had my Grandmother! I found little handwritten notes all over the tree. Notes that weren’t there in 1997 when we photocopied it.

Taylor-Webb Family Tree. Living person information blurred for privacy.

Not only did I find notes in my Grandma’s handwriting, there were notes from another person too! This could have been from my Aunt. It could have been from someone who was just visiting and they were discussing the tree. It doesn’t really matter, what I do know is that even though this tree has some errors in it, it’s a wealth of information in other ways.

Treasure Chest Thursday is a daily blogging topic from GeneaBloggers.

I am in love with this website. I love this website so much, I’m pretty sure I’d take the drastic step of marrying it if I could. I’m not experienced or smart enough to get lost in the technical jargon about the website, so you’ll have to go elsewhere for that.

I have been using the FamilySearch “Pilot” site for many years now. Mostly in past years for their wonderful collection of Ohio Death Certificates. Recently they’ve made a drastic change. That change is adding so many names to the database I’ll probably never come out on the other side.

I’ve always been hampered in my research in the fact that I have practically no means of travel. If it isn’t in my own town, most likely I can’t get there. Washington D.C. is a day trip that doesn’t happen often, maybe more now, but we’ll see. With these new website updates though, I may not have to stress too bad about that any longer.

A lot of the records they’ve recently put online are just indexes. So they aren’t the most helpful (mostly because of transcription interpreting I think). That doesn’t even hint on the way that they source the indexes and how valid the actual index information is.

This is my favorite part though. I found this marriage record for Mary J Webb. I don’t know who Mary J Webb is quite honestly. I know who her parents are though. Enoch Webb and Jane Lindsey. I’m actually pretty sure of Webb research, so it did surprise me to find a daughter for these two. She was born around 1884 and didn’t marry until 1915. So by all intents and purposes she should be living at home with her parents in 1900 and 1910. That isn’t so though. In fact, it wasn’t until I found this record that I remembered something that always stumped me before. Enoch had an older brother Amos. In 1900 and 1910 Amos had a niece living with him named Minnie/Mammie. I was always stumped by who this girl could belong to. She popped up in 1900 out of nowhere. If I had the 1890 census, things would have been clearer. Once I found this record though, I got excited. I’d finally identified her! The birthday fits and everything.

Is this a 100% identification? Maybe not, but it’s the closest I might ever get! What can I do to verify this information? Well I’m going to have to see where Family Search got their information.

So I took the Film Number and plugged it into the Family History Library Catalog Search.

This is the microfilm that gives me the above information. Straight from the Brown County Courthouse! That’s without a 10+ hour trip to Ohio with people who aren’t exactly into going through old records and cemeteries.

What exactly do I plan to do with this?

I plan to see it for myself, in person if at all possible.

The Genealogy Gods are smiling down on me today folks. They do have a Family History Center in my town! This is great news, and I plan to get a to do list together and head in there in the very near future!

FamilySearch Record Search

Follow Friday is a daily blogging theme I got from GeneaBloggers. To participate in Follow Friday, simply create a post in which you recommend another genealogy blogger, a specific blog post, a genealogy website or a genealogy resource. Tell us why they are important to the genealogy community and why we should follow.

The first Google Earth Adventure was so much fun, I’m back to do it again! This time it will be taking you on one of my first Genealogy trips. It took place around 2003 or 2004? I’m not exactly sure. It was this trip when I got the majority of my Tombstone pictures. We were in Ohio for a reunion and I convinced Grandma to take us to Kentucky to visit the cemetery. Actually, it might have been her idea. Like I said, who can remember. This was when I was just getting into putting all my gathered information together. It was right before Grandma insisted on putting herself in the nursing home and the dementia set in. I even recorded her telling me a story from her childhood. I might have to attach that to the end of this post!

So here’s where we began our adventure. Let me be up front with you. This was our first time visiting Kentucky. Grandma grew up in this area, but it had been awhile since she last visited. This was before GPS navigators also. So we were taking all our directions from Grandma…. That was foreshadowing if you didn’t recognize it. So to the left is where Grandma said her old “homestead” was located, and to the right was the cemetery we were planning to visit. So we headed left first.

This is what we saw for the majority of the trip to left. It was a long windy road that eventually lead back to the river, and when I say river I mean the Ohio River. The big one.

To once again practice full disclosure, I can’t quite remember where the old homestead was located. It’s possible it’s no longer there. The Google Earth photos aren’t really great. Then again, it’s a very tree lined road, so I doubt that better pictures would help anyway.

As you can see the road goes through that heavily forested area. So somewhere in those trees is where my Grandma lived as a girl.

So now we backtrack and cross the road. This side had many more houses and not as many trees. It’s known as Johnsville, KY.

Just under a mile down the road we ran across this small cemetery. This is where Grandma told us “the babies are buried.” Her Grandmother, Mollie Jane Webb-Taylor had three sets of twins, many of which never made it past infancy. This little cemetery is where they were buried, most likely in unmarked graves.

Here is the family listing in my family file. The “babies” aren’t the only ones buried in this cemetery. One of my ancestors buried his first wife here, and I even feel a little guilty that the first wife is resting here, while he rests over in the big cemetery with his second wife. It doesn’t seem fair to the wife who died so young. If I had a time machine, I’d really love to look back at some of the hidden stories in my family’s history.

Here is the two cemeteries in relation to each other on the map. Unfortunately the big cemetery doesn’t have street view. So I can’t show you how big that cemetery really is. Trust me it’s bigger than it looks.

I have many relatives in this cemetery. Many of those relatives I’ve yet to identify. Sometimes I wonder if bigger cemeteries can actually be “family” cemeteries. I mean if you think about it in these rural areas, most everyone ended up related anyway right? So it almost gives it a family feel.

It is after we left Johnsville Cemetery that day that things got… dicey. There was a cousin of my Mom’s that lives right past the cemetery, so we tried to stop by and see him. He’s got a bunch of Webb family photos that I’m dying to see! Unfortunately, he wasn’t at home that day. He got called into work. After we left the cemetery, I imagine we spent the next hour or so driving around aimlessly. Somehow we got turned around. Or maybe we went right instead of going left, the way we’d come. We’ll never know now. Needless to say, we were lost. Lost in Kentucky without a GPS unit to tell us it was “recalculating” to get us the heck home!

We were all getting quite cranky. We were tired, hungry, and just plain ready to be done. We’d been gone most of the day and it was still a long drive back to Dillsboro, IN where Grandma lived. Just when I was about to throw myself on the ground and start kicking my feet around, we drove up to this.

In the interest of once again practicing full disclosure; When we pulled up to this cemetery, we pulled up from the road on the right you see now. I couldn’t show you that though, because it doesn’t have street view. We were really excited to see the yellow lines on the road when we pulled up too. Nothing like good old yellow lines to show that you’re actually on a road that goes somewhere!

This cemetery took us by complete surprise. We weren’t looking for it, we just found it. In fact it would be many years until I could find it again on a map.  There were two sections. The one by the church, and then this older section across the street. This section is my “family cemetery.” I can’t even list the amount of Taylors and Webbs I found in this cemetery. I was completely taken by surprise.

Once I found a certain Webb family, I knew where I was. I had no idea how to get back to Indiana, but I knew where we were. We had somehow found Lenoxburg Cemetery. The cemetery I most wanted to visit. In fact, it’s still on the top of my list. Now that I’m more aware of how many relatives are buried there, I’ve got to go back and document a lot more tombstones. Next time I’m taking my GPS with me though.

Download Google Earth

Credit: All credit for these images goes to Google Earth. I did not take any of these pictures. I only visited Kentucky from the comfort of my home, in my fluffy pajamas. Please do not sue me, I have nothing except for my fluffy pajamas and a GPS unit.