Genealogy Journal - 12/17/07

As Christmas approaches, I find that I'm not able to do as much genealogy research, but I'm trying to keep the blog posting going and my email traffic flowing.

I got on the computer at 9 AM, and read my email and Bloglines. I quickly wrote my post on Christmas Stockings and then wrote a post about which ancestor of mine appears most often in the census records. Then I went shopping for Christmas gifts...see, I have a life other than genealogy (I'm not claiming success in this endeavor, however).

I was back home by 1 PM, and since it was Monday it was time for Della's Journal - Week 51. I'm almost done with this project - now I'll have to get it all into a word processing document, add some historical and biographical information about the people, and publish it somewhere. On the way home from shopping, I realized that Abigail (Vaux) Smith was in more census records than Henry A. Carringer, so I put a post together to document that, but haven't finished it yet. I spent some time capturing census documents for Abby and her family, including two Kansas State Census records for 1875 and 1885. I have her in every Federal census except 1860 and 1890. Linda came home, I helped her a bit, and then took a nap. I got back on at about 5 PM to check email and Bloglines but then had to stop at 5:30.

Tonight, we went to a dinner theater presentation of "An American Christmas" at the Hotel del Coronado, put on by Lambs Players Theater in Coronado. This is a $100 a plate dinner, with the actors in costume and character for 1907, and the whole affair was extremely well done. We got there at 6:30 PM dressed up (I even wore a tie for the first time in probably two years or so) and ready to go. After hors d'oeuvres on the periphery, we were seated with 6 others at our table at about 7 PM. The actors came around to introduce themselves (every "family" had two tables) and get to know us a little bit. Then the show really began - with introductions of the "Marshall family" (I'm going to find out if they were real or fictional - I'm guessing the latter), some entertainment, a toast, then soup, salad and main course. Each course was introduced by songs. After the main course, they had 60 minutes of entertainment - songs, dances, jokes, stories, etc. - all appropriate for 1907. Finally, there was dessert, a final round of entertainment, we all sang "Silent Night" and said good night. We got home at 10 PM.

The snail mail came just before we left, so I was eager to get to the package from Old World Wisconsin. It has a 60 page paper about my ancestor, Ranslow Smith and his inn that stood in Dodge County, Wisconsin. I scanned it when I got home, and there is lots of interesting information about his life and the house. The report mentions his parents names (which I didn't know before contacting OWW in 2006) and his brothers names (which I had surmised earlier from land records). I will post some of this information, especially as it demonstrates what information can be found by digging into local records, in the coming weeks. I really want to visit Old World Wisconsin now, since Ranslow Smith's "Four Mile House" is located there.

Genealogy today -- only 4.0 hours total, of which 1.0 was reading email and Bloglines, 1.5 hours was blogging, 1.0 hour was research, and 0.5 hour was reading my snail mail.