Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Fork Ridge Christian Church Cemetery

In case you haven't noticed, the June 29 update to my website included a new cemetery page for the Fork Ridge Christian Church Cemetery.  It joins the two that were already there for the Bartlett-Rulong and Harris Family cemeteries, both also on Fork Ridge in Marshall County, West Virginia.

These pages include the person's name as it appears on the gravestone, their date of death, date of burial when known, and special transcriptions other than the typical birth and death dates.  The link attached to an individual's name will take you to their "person page" which in many cases will contain a link to a photo of their gravestone.

I won't be doing these pages for every cemetery in my database, but there will be more added in the future ... so check back soon.

Monday, June 29, 2015

Source Errors Fixed

Sometimes fixing something is a whole lot easier than figuring out what needs fixed!  

I discovered a number of errors on the Sources page for my website where the code for a particular piece of info was appearing rather than the actual info.

A couple examples:
  • [DWELLING NO.] would appear rather than the actual dwelling number for a census year
  • [STATE FILE NO.] would appear rather than the actual State file number from a death certificate.
It took me a while to notice that all of the codes ended with "NO."  It appears that using an abbreviation for "number" rather than spelling it out created havoc.  So the fix was really easy once I figured out what was happening. Yay!

I'll probably find more issues with the sources, but this was a huge step forward.  See me smiling???

Friday, June 26, 2015

Website Updated

Whew!  I barely beat midnight, but I accomplished my goal yesterday to update my West Virginia Heritage site on the one year anniversary.  If you think that means that this blog is one year old, guess again ... then check out yesterday's post.

Changes included in this update:
  • 37 new people were added.

  • Main menu bar: The Photos tab now has more choices in the drop-down menu so you can get to the family line photos a little faster.

  • Main menu bar: Newly added is the Cemeteries tab which is still a work in progress.  So far, there are two cemeteries included but more will be added.  These links take you to new pages that contain my transcriptions of gravestone markers. 
For now ... that's all folks!

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Back to Genealogy

The genealogy bug has finally bitten me again after several months away from all things related to family history/research.  The trigger?  One of my annual subscriptions was up for renewal.  Funny how spending money can be like a kick in the pants!

Last night I realized that it was exactly one year since I had updated my website ... and it had been even longer since posting here on the blog.  I had worked a little bit on genealogy during that time (key word "little"), but a lot of it had been on my husband's family - a whole different story that has no impact on my blog or website.

During the last year there has been a final phase of remodeling and trying to restore order to the house, vacations, and the pièce de résistance ... two days after Christmas I hurt my back moving boxes.  So bad that my doctor prescribed a muscle relaxer and Acetaminophen laced with codeine to handle the pain.  I spent January doing physical therapy three days a week.  I'm much, much better now but it's difficult admitting that there are limits to what I can do.  Good thing genealogy doesn't require much heavy lifting!

Back to triggers.  The annual renewal mentioned above is for historical newspapers - and I finally succeeded at finding articles on a story line that I had never been able to locate before.  My Church family will be interested in future posts about the 1878 murder of Mary Church and the subsequent lynching of John Wallace.  We knew the gist of the story, but I uncovered a lot of new details.  Stay tuned for those.

For my Harris and Aston families ... I have large, oval photos of my grandparents, Charles McClure Harris and Dessie Charlotte Aston - the kind that are usually in antique frames with bubble glass.  Over the years, they had faded and had developed a lot of cracks/scratches.  I finally took them to a photographer for restoration and the results are amazing!  He is working on a revised website and will be including the before and afters on it.  Once the new website for Studio Ten is online, I'll post more about this undertaking.

As for my website, I should be uploading an update later today - I don't want to miss that one year anniversary!  It will include 37 new people and some formatting changes that I had started last year.  More about that tomorrow.  For now ... let's just say "I'm baaack!" and planning to be more active with this blog.  It's a little late, but:

Happy New Year!