Fork Ridge Christian Church - Part 1

As a young girl, Sunday meant going to church at the Fork Ridge Christian Church, located on Fork Ridge Road in Marshall County, West Virginia. We lived on Fork Ridge about 8 miles from Moundsville, the church was about 1½ miles further at the intersection of Brushy Ridge and Fork Ridge.

According to a history of the church written by one of my aunts who is still living, "Beginning in 1896 the congregation met in the Terrill, Upper Bane and Harris schools for lack of a regular meeting place. In 1898 the present building was erected by contractor Morgan Hicks. The land was donated by John Pierce and is deeded Sept. 20, 1898. Stone for the foundation was taken from the Joseph Parks farm and the stonemason was David Briggs."

Fork Ridge Christian Church ~ 1938

This photo above, courtesy of C. P. Rulong, shows the Fork Ridge Christian Church in 1938.  Above the door it reads: “Fork Ridge Christian Church, Built 1898.” Although it is hard to see, there is a small building at the left edge of the photo just behind the fence that was a coal shed.

Fork Ridge Christian Church

The picture on the right shows the church after the vestibule was added. This photo, found on the Marshall County GenWeb site, was undated. This is what I remember the church looking like when I attended there as a child. I remember sitting on those steps in the summer for Christian Endeavor (CE) youth meetings.

Going back to the history written by my aunt … “Charter members included Mr. & Mrs. John Pierce, Mr. & Mrs. A. Muldrew, Mr. & Mrs. S. M. Stewart, Mr. & Mrs. Uriah Harris, Mr. & Mrs. O. H. Lydick, John Day, A. Lowe, Tom Richmond, Johnson family, and Cummins family among others.”

Uriah Harris is my 2nd great-grandfather; his wife Mary Ann was a Lydick. The Stewart's had a son, Orrin Homer Stewart, who married Elizabeth Virginia “Bess” Harris, a granddaughter of Uriah & Mary Ann. Mary Bane Cummins married Oscar Leslie “Bones” Harris, a grandson of Uriah & Mary Ann.

My aunt also wrote that, “The church was closed in the mid 1920's and reopened in June of '29 or '30. Only Sunday School was held for 2 or 3 years. Rev. Howearth held a revival in 1932 when more than 40 people joined the church.” I found baptismal records for three ancestors that likely resulted from that revival: 

Mrs. Dessie (Aston) Harris, my grandmother

Lawrence Harris

Opal (Stewart) Lautar

Tomorrow in Part 2 of this series, I'll post a few more of these baptismal records, including my mother's, and talk a little more about the church.

Great-grandma Hattie and the 1900 U.S. Federal Census

I've been doing a lot of clean-up of the way I had recorded census sources in my genealogy database. Trying to establish a sense of consistency in preparation of creating a website later this year.

Hattie (Clark) Kuhn

In the process, I ran across an case that had always amused me. My paternal great-grandmother was Hattie May Clark who married Adam Kuhn on 18 January 1898. Their first child and only son, Herbert Kuhn, was my grandfather and he was born on 05 November 1898.

Fast-forward to 1900 when the U.S. Federal Census recorded data for each household as of 01 June 1900. Sure enough, Adam and Hattie appear on the census living in a rented home at 1206 Fourth Street, Moundsville, WV. They had been married two years and Hattie was the mother of one child, still living. So far, so good.

However, Hattie also appears in another household next door at 1208 Fourth Street. She was recorded as a single daughter living with her parents, Samuel and Margaret Clark. Huh???

Both households show Hattie as being 21 years old, born in July 1878. Interestingly, older sister Della is also recorded as living with Samuel and Margaret - being 27 years old, born April 1873, and single. Is that true? Or is she also actually married and living somewhere else too?

A quick jaunt to one of my favorite websites, the Vital Research Records from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, and I found a marriage certificate for James Peters and Della V. Clark, married in Marshall County on 24 December 1889. Della was 18, which would equate to a birth circa 1872. And guess who the informant is ... Samuel Clark. So it's pretty safe to assume that this is the same Della.

Back to the census page, and just two households from Adam and Hattie I find James and Della Peters at 1202 Fourth Street. Here Della is recorded as 28 years old, born in April 1872, married for ten years, with two of three children still living.

So I think I've just figured out why my great-grandmother Hattie was listed in two households. It appears that Samuel and Margaret reported all of their children, regardless of whether they were single and living with them or married and living in another house. But why would they have reported Della and Hattie as single? My guess is that they just told the census enumerator names and birth dates – the enumerator probably assumed they were single.

Moral of this story … census records needs to be taken with a grain of salt. They contain a wealth of info - but it's good to find other sources that confirm it.  Names are frequently misspelled, and other info often contains mistakes, as in this story.  Be cautious!

Sharing Photographs

Yesterday my Labeling Photographs post not only talked about labeling your photos, but I also urged you to get them out of magnetic albums if you have any there.  That's one piece of advice I consider worth repeating!

Most of the photos folks take today are digital, and it's good to convert any older photos you have into the digital format also.  You can scan them and then save the files as TIF or PNG files to keep as your archive copies.  You don't want to save the original scans as JPEG files because that format uses lossy compression.  Each time the file is opened and re-saved as a JPEG, it will lose data - and once you save a lossy file, you can never go back to the previous state.
 
If you need to edit a photo, first make a copy of the original scan and then do your editing to that copy.  You always want to keep an unedited archive copy of the original scan.  There are a lot of web sites with tips about scanning and editing photos, so I won't go into that here.  One place with a lot of info is "Creating & Editing Digital Photos" on one of About.com's genealogy pages.

Moving on to sharing – there are a variety of ways I can think of for sharing your photos:

 Sharing “paper” photos:

• Printing them out and giving copies to friends & family
• Creating a photo album or a scrapbook as a gift 

Sharing digitized photos:

• Emailing your files to others
• Uploading to a photo-sharing site like flickr or snapfish where they can be stored in albums and shared
• Creating digital scrapbook pages

Digital scrapbooks are created using any photo editing software that has the ability to work with levels. I haven't it tried it myself … yet … but I can see a lot of possibilities based on the sample page included in a "Digital Scrapbooking for Genealogists" post on the Shades of the Departed blog.

I could create a page with scanned photos of Mom's high school class ring, her Thespian pin, and a photo of her entire class that graduated in 1943 from Cameron High School. I could create a page to document Dad's service in the Marines that would include his dress uniform photo, his battallion photo, and scans of all the military memorabilia he kept in a box. Pretty cool.

As a genealogist, sharing family photos with others has the benefit of giving me a form of insurance against fires, floods, computer crashes, and any other way that photos can be destroyed. Last fall I scanned a LOT of photos from a distant cousin's albums that were a real treasure trove to me … but the flip side of that is that I am now a backup source for him. Should something happen to his albums, I have digital files that can be used to replace many of his photos.

I have so much work to do on my own photos, it's time to stop blogging and start following some of my own advice!

Labeling Photographs

Most folks have a few old photographs of some type … early Kodak black & whites, postcards, cabinet cards, maybe even a tintype. If you have old photos of your ancestors, here's the catch … do you know who is who? Did someone take the time to identify at least names if not dates and/or places? If so, count your blessings!

If you have photos that aren't identified, but YOU know who it is … please get them identified ASAP … future generations will thank you. At a minimum, use an archival pen (not ballpoint) to write any info you know on the back of the photo. I like to use Micron pigma ink pens – they are soft-tipped and the archival ink is perfect for acid-free environments.

You can take this identification one step further and assemble your photos into albums scrapbook-style. For your originals, photo corners work well as the photos get no adhesive on them and can easily be removed. Many folks recommend making copies of your originals to use in scrapbooks; those can be attached directly to your pages with acid-free adhesives.

Please, please, please tell me you do not have your photos in the magnetic photo albums – those things are nasty. Mom was ahead of her time when it came photo albums. She made personalized albums for my sister and me years ago that chronicled the events of our lives – if made today they would be called scrapbooks. Unfortunately, magnetic photo albums were all the rage back then and that's what Mom used.

Working slowly and using great care, I was able to remove the photos without too much damage, although I did have to use un-du Adhesive Remover on many of the photos to get them to release from the sticky album pages. Mom had typed the comments on her old Underwood typewriter, and I was able to match a computer font to the typeface and recreate her comments. I even copied the few typos just to maintain authenticity! By following Mom's page layouts in an archival quality photo album, my niece and I were able to surprise my sister one Christmas with a copy of the album Mom had made for her. Moral of the story … there is hope if you do have magnetic albums … but I recommend taking action sooner rather than later.

Next post, I'll discuss ways to share photographs and the benefits of doing so.

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