My Research/Writing Plan For 2011

For the 101st Edition of the Carnival of Genealogy, Jasia, at Creative Gene, has challenged genea-bloggers to write about "My genealogy research/writing plan for 2011."  Let's just say this is something like a list of New Year's Resolutions - genealogy-speaking, that is.  So here is what I have planned for next year.

My first goal is to locate the ancestors of my great-great-great-grandfather, John P. Gibson, who was born in 1799 in South Carolina.  For over ten years now, I have been unsuccessful in determining the names of his parents and his siblings.  Further examination of South Carolina,  Tennessee, and north Mississippi records is warranted, and maybe, just maybe, 2011 will be the year that my research comes together.

Secondly, I plan to load photos of gravestones in of one Holmes County cemetery on to the Find-A-Grave website. Most of the deceased buried in that cemetery are related to me through my mother's side of the family. Although, I have posted about many of these ancestors already, it is time that I share all the photos with other researchers.

Another item on my agenda is to write a follow-up story about the descendants of Robert W. Ragland/Raglin, a brother to my paternal great-great-great-grandmother.  Based on information I recently discovered during a review of the U.S. Census of 1870, Robert fathered at least four mulatto children by an unidentified female after his first wife died about 1855.  Descendants of these four children still live in several counties in Mississippi and in other places throughout the country.

Organizing my multitude of photos is neither research nor writing, but it is something that will make my research and writing much easier in 2011.  It is a task that I plan to accomplish in small segments spread out over the year. Included in the task is scanning actual photos and reorganizing photos already in digital format. Purchasing some new technology currently on my "wish list," such as an upgrade of my current edition of Photoshop, will surely make the task much easier.

Transcribing and writing about some original documents I obtained from the National Archives is a small, but vital part of my plan. Although I have previously posted details from some of these documents, there is still a wealth of information in them that provides leads for additional research on my paternal side of the family.  Additionally, I want to explore and photograph tombstones in several Mississippi cemeteries, including two in Holmes County and another in a remote part of southwest Mississippi. 

Now that I have these tasks in writing, it makes it much easier to decide where to begin.  And as we family researchers all know, there really is no ending.....there is just more research to do.

  

Our Roots Are Showing......

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of you who have found your Irish roots and to those of you who are still searching. Even before I began my own family research, I knew that we had some Irish blood. When I was young, growing up in Mississippi, I would ask my mother, "Where are we from?" And my mother would always answer, "We are English, Scotch, and Irish." When I asked my father the same question, he added that (his) "Grandma told me that we have German blood." My paternal grandmother's response to my question was (her) "Papa's family was Black Dutch from Pennsylvania," and (her) "Mama's grandfather was a full-blooded Indian."

The truth is that each of their answers was, in part, true, although my great-grandmother's grandfather was not Native American. I do not have all the answers yet for this particular ancestor, but it appears that his South Carolina heritage was likely a tri-racial one that possibly included some Native American blood.

Now that I am older, when I think about the names of families in my childhood neighborhood and of my classmates from school, l realize that so many of them were Scotch-Irish names. Names that began with "Mc," or an "O" followed by an apostrophe, may have outnumbered even the Smiths and the Joneses in Mississippi during those days. With over ten years of research behind me, and with a family tree that includes the names Atwood, Baldridge, Coggins, Gibson, Meriwether, Pettus, Porter, and Ragland, it seems that my mother's answer to my childhood question was the correct one.

And now that my brother has three sons with red hair and two of my own grandchildren have beautiful red hair, I do believe that our Scotch-Irish roots are "starting to show."