Charles McClure Harris (1884 - 1932)

My maternal grandfather ... I never knew him.  In fact, he died when my mother was only seven years old, so she barely knew him herself.  He was taken at the young age of 48 from "glioma of the right frontal lobe of the brain" in doctor-speak (a brain tumor to most of us).

When I read that on his death certificate, I wondered if there was a reason for specifying the right frontal lobe; why not just say a glioma of the brain and leave it at that?  I've learned that frontal lobe activities include intellectual functioning, thought processes, behavior, and memory; and depending on whether he was right- or left-handed, could also have affected his speech and writing.

According to his obituary, "During his sickness and untold suffering for many weeks he never uttered a word of complaint and was ready to go when God called him.  Complications of diseases caused his death."  Mom always said he died from a brain tumor; she never mentioned complications.  Perhaps there were issues that she was unaware of at her young age - issues that her mother never spoke about later.

My grandfather's obituary also stated that, "He was born and reared on a farm and spent his entire life toiling at farming as an occupation."  Yes, he was born on a farm on Fork Ridge (Marshall County, WV), and yes, he was a farmer ... but he was also a street car conductor according to my father.

In the photo at the top, my grandfather is wearing his streetcar uniform and a hat with the number 295 on it.  I have a pair of large, oval antique frames with photos of my grandparents in which he is also wearing the streetcar uniform.  The Marshall County WVGenWeb Virtual Wheeling Area Trolley Museum includes several photos with motormen wearing the same style hat as my grandfather, and one Benwood photo shows men in the same white shirt and white tie combo that he is wearing.  It appears likely that my grandfather would have been employed by the Wheeling Traction Company, the name under which the Wheeling Railway Company was reorganized in 1899.

Although my grandfather's birth registration says he was born on the 23rd of January 1884, there is a lot of conflicting info that says it was actually the 20th.  Charlie, as he was commonly known, married Dessie Charlotte Aston on 29 September 1920.  They had two daughters, Eva Mae born in 1922, and my mother, Alda Louise born in 1925.  My grandfather's death on 15 June 1932 marked the end of a three-month battle against the brain tumor.  As he had become a member of the Fork Ridge Christian Church in October 1908 when he was 24, he was buried in the cemetery that sits behind the church.

In Memoriam - Donald Glenn Kuhn

For several years, January 11 was the day our family celebrated my nephew's birthday.  Now January 11 is also the anniversary of my father's death.  Don Kuhn died in his sleep two years ago ... peacefully and quickly ... just the way he wanted ... but totally unexpected. 

We knew he had health problems - he had been diabetic for many years and that affects the body in so many ways. As it turned out, Dad's kidneys were failing ... what my sister and I didn't know was how advanced the failure was.  Thankfully, a heart attack took him before he reached the dialysis stage - he would have hated that with a passion.

Nearly ten years prior, our family had to make the difficult decision to move Mom into a nursing home due to the progression of Alzheimer's Disease.  For a few years, she continued to recognize my sister and me, but it was Dad whose presence could make her eyes light up even after she could no longer speak.  A testament to the strength of their love, he visited Mom every day, feeding her lunch and dinner, and sitting with her throughout the afternoons.  As the disease progressed and Mom ate less and less, Dad still visited every day, patiently coaxing her to eat.  How many men would do that?

Dad was a loving husband, father and grandfather ... he had extra special relationships with his two grandchildren.  He was strong in his Christian faith and loved to sing hymns and listen to gospel music.  On this two-year anniversary of his death, I like to picture Mom and Dad in heaven ... he is singing while she is lovingly listening ... just as they used to do. 

Sharing Family History

I've wanted to share my research online for some time, but my fear of publishing info that may prove incorrect some day has held me back.  One of my biggest beefs with internet genealogy is the wrong info that gets repeated over and over because folks want to take the easy way out.  Rather than doing their own research to confirm the accuracy of data they find online, they automatically assume that if someone has posted it online, it must be correct.

Unfortunately, if I wait until I'm 100% sure my data is correct before I take my research online, it will never get published.  Human nature means errors occur even in official records such as birth registers, marriage licenses and death certificates.  Some errors are simply mistakes ~ some are intentional misrepresentations of age in order to get married or to enlist in the military ~ some are due to the foggier memories that come with age.  And the list goes on and on.

So this is the year to forge ahead and go online with some of my info in a limited format.  My policies will be to:

• Include detailed information only for persons who have been recorded as deceased in my database.
• Generally exclude living persons in the interest of privacy.  (However, they may appear in photos, or be included in transcripts of commonly available records such as obituaries.)
• Identify my sources while limiting the level of source info revealed (no addresses, telephone numbers, etc.).

I think I'll go into more detail regarding privacy issues and source documentation in future blog postings.  I've got waaaayy to much to say about them and I don't want to turn this posting into a book!! 

Suffice it to say that I'm making progress and I'm "a fixin' to git ready" to share my family history.

Another New Year

I started experimenting with this blog in November ... and then promptly failed to add any posts at all during the month of December.  Where did the time go?  Two weeks in Colorado, a week to get ready for Christmas, two Christmas get-togethers, and a half week in Lexington, Kentucky to spend New Years with friends.  Whew!! 

So now the holidays are past and it's day no. 2 of the new year.  Time to get serious about this blog if I'm going to stick with it.  One of my biggest dilemmas has been deciding how to best share the genealogy info I already have while connecting with others who can provide updates/corrections and additional info.

For some time I've had a family site on MyFamily.com for my Church relatives.  Even though it was never as active as I had hoped, it did prove useful for sharing family photos with each other.  The folks at MyFamily.com worked on a new version of the program that provided a whole new "look and feel" and I migrated my old site over to the new version.  Unfortunately, it seems that ancestry.com is now letting the myfamily.com sites die a slow death (a long story that I won't go into here) so I've started looking into other possibilities.

I toyed with uploading a GEDCOM file to TribalPages.com but I haven't yet shared it with anyone.  I'm just not sure I want to go that route:  it requires that folks have yet another user name and password; and GEDCOM's aren't one of the strengths of my genealogy software.

In 2010, I joined facebook and created a group for my Church relatives.  A lot of my family already has facebook accounts, so it's easy to make a connection with them there.  My biggest complaint with facebook is that group pages cannot handle photo albums.  Photos, yes; albums, no.  The recent changes facebook instituted for groups still don't enable the use of albums, something that really disappoints me.  It's a feature that many folks desire, so maybe if I wait long enough it will happen.

At this point, I'm leaning toward a combination of methods to reach out to others:

• facebook to reach the social networkers with family photos
• my own website to provide the details of my research via individual histories, pedigrees, photos, etc. (more on this in the future when I'm ready to launch the site)
• this blog to discuss any number of things related to my genealogy quest

By providing links to tie all three together, I hope to begin sharing my info on a new level.  Here's to a new year!