My Blogging Experience to Date

I have been taking a course through the National Institute for Genealogical Studies (http://www.genealogicalstudies.com/), called Google for the Wise Genealogist. I just posted my assignment for the section on blogging, and I thought I would share it with you in a modified form as it describes my experience with this blog to date:

I do have my own blog, “My Descent into Descent”, which I started last November. It is by far one of the best things I have done to enhance my family history experience, and that of others, since I began this journey. The purpose of my blog mainly is to tell stories from all over my family tree which may be of interest to other people, and which may help me to connect with others who may have more information. I find that most people are not so much interested in looking at a family tree, but they do like the stories, especially when they seem to bring their ancestors to life in some way. The narratives I have done have helped me to sharpen up the research I am doing and to find more data along the way. I have received much more interest in this blog than I initially expected, and have connected with some of the distant family members I was hoping to find. My blog led me to visit some not-so-distant cousins this summer, and they showed me photos and other items from our shared heritage. We all felt that we had known each other for a long time. Amazing. When I started, I blogged almost every day, but that has trailed off in recent months. It is my love and my passion, so I hope to blog more frequently in future. I started out more methodically, but now I mostly go with my current inspirations. I have already accomplished my original goal of getting out all the family history stories of my ancestors who came to Canada, including all the family lore I had been told over the years. I have many ideas for more blogposts. This summer, I blogged from the road using my iPad during a family history road trip to New England. Taking this course has inspired me to blog more, and to try new things with my blog, such as embedding videos from YouTube, adding more widgets,  adding screenshots of parts of my tree from Ancestry (website and app), and posting an image of my spreadsheet from the last module! I highly recommend blogging, as you can tell. If anyone is wondering how to do it, I learned step by step from Lisa Louise Cooke’s “Family History Made Easy” podcast on iTunes, and her YouTube videos, which truly made the process “easy”.

Monk Family Baptism Records From St. Johnsville, Montgomery County, New York

I recently created a spreadsheet based on the book, Records of the Dutch Reformed Church: St. John's Church in the Town of St. Johnsville, Montgomery County, N.Y., which I found on Ancestry a while back. These are the baptisms of members of the Monk family which I was able to find in its pages. (I believe there may be more, so I will update you if I find them).The data in this book allowed me to make more sense of the lives of my three times great grandfather, Jacob Monk and his family, (i.e. the Jacob Monk born in around 1781 in German Flatts, Herkimer, New York, and not his son Jacob, who was born in 1814 in Minden, Montgomery, New York). Specifically, it helped me to realize that Jacob was not the "John Monk" or "Johannes Monk" who appeared in some records. The baptism records of the Dutch Reformed Church made it clear that Jacob and John were two separate people, and I am leaning toward them being brothers. These baptism records show them being sponsors at the baptisms of each other's children on the same day. I have decided to attach the spreadsheet I made in the hopes that it will help others with their research. I apologize for the small size of the chart, as the next size up would have been too big for, the space. If you click on, it will enlarge for you.

William Cook Family Tree

I am trying to find a way to include small sections of my family tree into some of my blogposts, as I would like to make the relationships between people clearer. This would help readers more easily get their bearings as to where we are on the tree when we are talking about particular individuals or families. Here is my first attempt, the family of William Cook, one of my maternal great great grandfathers. I have decided to use his tree to demonstrate this new feature as posts about him and his family are now among My Descent's most popular. This is taken from a screen shot from the Ancestry.com iPad app. You can click on the tree to enlarge it.

William Cook Family Tree

Here is a family group sheet clipped from my tree on Ancestry:

William Cook Family Group Sheet

You will definitely need to enlarge this by clicking on it. As you can see, I lack photos of Edward and Arthur Cook, so if you possess any of these, gentle reader, and you are willing to share them, I would be most obliged. Also, this chart highlights how little I know about Arthur Wilson Cook. The last record I have of him is in the 1906 Canada Census of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta when he is a "boarder" with the Alexander Dafoe family in Assinaboia East. The other odd thing about him is that he was born in Bexleyheath, Kent, while the family only appears to have lived in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. I would dearly love to know why his mother Emma gave birth to him there.

I would be interested in your feedback on my use of these charts and others like them in the future. I do plan to continue writing blogposts which tell stories from all over my tree, and I hope to reduce confusion about where in my tree individuals and families belong.

Cook, Saunders and Arnold Families: Vancouver in the early 1900's

I came across this wonderful footage today of Vancouver in 1907, eight years after the first members of the Arnold family came to Vancouver, four years before Emma Cook and the Herbert Saunders family arrived, and the same year Lily Elizabeth Newton Cook Arnold came with her husband and family. Quite amazing! I haven't viewed it carefully yet, so I haven't identified any landmarks. Maybe you can. Let me know.

William Sanderson: World War One Munitions Factory Worker

I previously wrote about my grandfather, William Sanderson, (William Sanderson: The Early Years), having worked in a munitions factory, likely somewhere in Cambridgeshire, during World War One. He always said it was his first job at the age of fourteen in 1917. I came across the following video of munitions workers in Britain recently, and wanted to share it with you as it helps to show what this work may have been like for him.

Baby Charles Saunders 1886-1886

West Monkton, the parish church of St. Augustine, 
From geograph.org.uk, Author Barbara Cook, Aug 31, 2006

I made some discoveries this morning regarding to the family of my great grandfather, Herbert Charles Saunders. (See my blogpost  Herbert Charles Saunders, 1884 to 1966, Part One). I was able to discover through www.freereg.org.uk that Herbert’s mother, Mary Jane Goff Saunders, was buried in West Monkton in the churchyard of St. Augustine on November 14, 1886, having died on November 8^th. Also buried there was the five-day-old Charles Saunders on October 30, 1886. We knew from Mary Jane’s death record that she died of tuberculosis, but there was no mention of the complications of childbirth. A family story stated that she had died “in childbirth”. Here we have evidence that she died very soon after the birth of her last son, Charles, so it is possible that childbirth was a factor in her death. So, we know now that Mary Jane had another son, Charles, who was born alive. I was able to locate records through the birth and death indexes which correspond to the burial record for Charles, and I may send for one or both of them.

Martha, Mary Eliza, and Clara Cook Revisited

As I have mentioned in the past, one of my main interests in researching my family history has been finding out more about the family of Emma and William Cook, my maternal great great grandparents. I am happy to say that additional information has been provided to me about their daughters Martha Annie Wheatly Cook, Mary Eliza Cook, and Clara Matilda Cook, who were also the sisters of my great grandmother, Faith. I had previously written about them in two blogposts entitled Mary Eliza and Albert Godfrey: The Cooks Born in Canada, and William and Emma Cook’s Other Children,  the latter of which I now realize contains some key errors about my great grand aunt Martha. Thanks to the kind assistance of some other descendants of William and Emma, I was able to sort this out. (I have also found several other pertinent records in the process. I have also decided to remove the incorrect information from the previous blogpost so as not to run the risk of perpetuating misinformation).

Previously, I had Martha married to a man named Druitt, having a daughter, travelling to England, and dying in 1920. In actuality, she married a man called David Moran, who was the brother of her sister Clara’s husband, Charles Benjamin Moran. David was born David Franklin Moran on June 9, 1878 in Wellington, Ontario to William Moran and Lydia Stephen Terry Moran. His father had been born in Londonderry, Ireland and his mother was born in Ontario. The family moved to Saskatchewan, where Martha and David likely met. They were married between 1901 and 1906, and censuses show them as single in 1901, and married in 1906. In 1906 they are living and farming next door to David’s brother Ben, who has Martha’s sister Clara living with him as a housekeeper.

On March 1, 1911 Martha and David’s son William Arthur Moran was born. It does not appear that they had any other children. By 1938, the family is living in Canoe, near Salmon Arm, British Columbia, where Martha and David reside for the rest of their lives. Martha died on October 24, 1949 in Kamloops, British Columbia of ovarian cancer. David passed away in Kamloops on January 21, 1957. They were both buried in Salmon Arm, likely in the Mount Ida Cemetery. According to family who knew her, she was shorter than her siblings, was “talkative”, and liked to bake cookies. Her son William Arthur, married Myrtle Juanita Lee on May 15, 1946, and was later divorced. They had at least one child, a daughter, who apparently is still living. Arthur died on July 7, 1970 in Vancouver.

I have recently also discovered that David and Martha Moran had played a special role in the life of Martha’s sister, Mary Eliza Cook, when they were living in Rocanville, Saskatchewan. According to a newspaper article of unknown date and origin in the possession of family, they hosted Martha’s wedding to William Foster.  His surname is incorrectly written as “Forest” in the article:

Unknown newspaper and date
Image courtesy of H. Chagun

I estimate the marriage to have taken place in about 1915, as in the previous year Mary is listed under her maiden name in a Vancouver Directory, and the next year she is married according to census data. It is lovely to imagine how she looked as a bride, and how they all must have enjoyed the “large reception and dance”. It is also wonderful to know that her brother-in-law, and husband of her sister Clara, gave her away, and that her brother Godfrey attended the groom. From what I can gather, the "ribbon race" may have been marriage custom from the British Isles, in which the winners won prizes such as alcohol, or were declared the next to be married. (If anyone knows more about wedding "races", I would love to hear what you have to say). Mary Eliza and William had two sons, one named David William Foster, who was born in Winnipeg on June 7, 1918, and who died on September 26, 1989 in White Rock, British Columbia. Their other son may still be living, so no further information will be mentioned now. I have been able to locate William’s date of death, which is January 1, 1972, in New Westminster, British Columbia.

Through the information provided by family, I was also able to find the death date of Mary Eliza and Martha’s sister, Clara Matilda Cook Moran. She died on February 2, 1917, at the age of forty-five, in Rocanville, Saskatchewan, where she was living. She is also buried there. I have no information that she and Ben ever had any children, perhaps due to Clara's advanced age of thirty-eight when she got married in 1910. Ben died on April 27, 1938 in Salmon Arm, where he had been staying for seven months, likely with his brother David, as Martha was the informant for his death registration.