Family Tree Firsts is a genealogy blog following the adventures of Brian Parotto of Hampshire, Ill., a budding genealogist, as he works his way through the Family Tree University curriculum and reports on his family history research.
Family lore says Thomas Armstrong participated in one of the early Oklahoma land runs and owned property near what eventually became the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. The 1900 census shows them living in Elk, Okla. By 1910, the Armstrongs had moved on to Texas. I found Elk (which no longer exists) on a historic map that puts it near what is now downtown Oklahoma City.
I decided to drop by Tulsa’s county health department to see if I could get Baby Sam’s birth certificate. After waiting for what seemed like forever, I presented my form to the young woman at the window. She told me that, because I wasn’t an immediate relative, not only would they not give me a birth record, they wouldn’t even attempt to search for one. Now I understand there are privacy issues, but for pete’s sake — my Uncle Sam was born and died more than 90 years ago!
It’s been almost a year now, and it really is time to make a commitment. The kind where you choose “the one” and commit until death do you part. I’m talking, of course, about choosing a genealogy program.
March 17, 2011 Who doesn’t want to be just a little bit Irish on St. Paddy’s Day? When I was a kid, I thought having an Irish ancestor was prestigious. I remember when my dad told me about his great-grandfather John Haworth (the Civil War veteran I wrote about in the last post), he mentioned John had a wife was named Sarah O’Rella Hodges. At least that’s the way I heard it. I thought, “Yippee, I’m Irish!” Sadly, when I started researching last spring I discovered that …
One of the few family history stories I heard growing up was about an ancestor who fought in the War Between the States. His name was John Leonard Haworth, and he was my great-great grandfather.
Sometime in the late 1880s, my great-grandfather and his father were working out in the fields when they were approached by two bearded men. The men offered to buy the farm. Porter named a ridiculously high price (or so he thought). The men spoke to each other in German, agreed to the price and pulled out a large wad of cash. Just like that, Porter sold the farm.
The weekend might sound fairly ordinary, anticlimactic even. It was anything but. Dad finally met his brother, I met my cousins, and our whole view of who we thought we were has shifted.
So, last week I attended Family Tree University’s Missouri Genealogy Crash Course webinar. Oh my gosh! If you’ve never taken one of these webinars you are definitely missing out.
It was relatively easy to locate my cousin Alton Kent Blosser III. I dialed his number and waited nervously for Kent to come to the phone. I still had no idea if the Blosser family even knew about Dad. Turns out they didn’t. A.K. Blosser Sr. had quite literally taken that particular secret to his grave.
I’m sure Dad had questions about his father as he was growing up, but he didn’t learn the full story of his parentage until his grandmother “accidentally” left Dad’s birth certificate on the kitchen table one day. I’m not sure if the document contained his father’s name, but somehow Dad learned that his father’s name was Alton Blosser.