Brown Roots

Week 4 of #52ancestors - Invite to Dinner Which ancestor would I most want to invite to dinner?  I'd go with my grandfather, Chester Brown. He died when I was just a year old, and he's the only grandparent I have no memory of. Even my mother's mother, who died when I was 6, left me a handful of warm fuzzy memories. My father never talked much about him. When I asked what his job was, the answer was "mostly odd jobs here and there".  I don't know if that was because of who he was or because it was the Depression. Maybe some of both. I got the impression he was handy. My father kept some of his tools until late in life, when my parents sold their house to move into a retirement facility. When I was a teenager his life and death seemed like ancient history.  There was an old black and white photo of him on a side table at my grandmother's. In an era of color pictures and Polaroids, that photo might as well have been from 1900. I realize now that for my...

Week 3 of #52ancestors  - Longevity I have 2 perspectives on longevity to discuss. The first is the usual type: how long someone lives. My father had a good long life, dying a few weeks before his 91st birthday. That isn't unusual longevity, but it is exceptional compared to his three immediate direct-line male ancestors who all died before age 60. My grandfather Chester Brown (Dec 1898 - Jun 1958) died at 59 after two heart attacks. His father, William Newton Brown (Oct 1864 - Nov 1910) died at 46. His death certificate lists the cause as "Exhaustion" followed by 2 blank lines, then "Pulmonary". Whether that means pulmonary exhaustion or exhaustion along with pulmonary issues, who knows. The contributory cause was tuberculosis.  William's father, Albert Newton Brown (1834 - Mar 1868) died around age 34. I don't yet know the cause of death, but this is not an inspiring heredity for longevity. My father had coronary artery disease, hypertension, and...

Week 2 of #52ancestors There are so many candidates for a favorite photo. The one of my mother and her sister as little girls pushing a doll buggy full of kittens. One of my great-grandfather sitting on his front porch, leg across one knee, smoking a pipe. It's hard to pick one favorite, but I find it best to go with that first instinct. The one that came to mind as soon as I read the topic is a typical group photo in front of a house. My great-grandparents are in the middle of the back row. Octavus Chambers holds his youngest (at the time) child Lester, the only boy out of an eventual seven. To their right is Mary Jane (Havens) Chambers. Given the estimated date based on the children's apparent ages, we think she may be pregnant with my grandmother, Millie. The others are her relatives from the Havens, Barrows, and Bockoven families. Many of them had just been names and dates to me until I saw this picture, which came to me totally by accident.  I was at a Chambers...

I created this blog nearly 13 years ago. I intended to post about genealogy, both about my personal research and in general, but just never made time for it. Now, thanks to Amy Johnson Crow's #52ancestors initiative, I will at least get started. Appropriately, the topic for week 1 is Start and I'm using that to cover how I got started with genealogy. It began when I was a child, with my mother's mother's Chambers family of Delaware County, Ohio. Like many families, this one had annual reunions. Unlike most, they had a president, secretary, and treasurer, and kept annual minutes of reunion attendees and births, marriages, and deaths over the preceding year. There were always one or two people who were the de facto family genealogists. Each year they'd turn up with some new find, maybe some pictures, or a new branch, or a book. But often it was just a discussion and my mother would jot down notes, trying to keep up with the speaker. Later I'd type them up (b...