I know very little about my paternal grandmother. Oh, I have the usual birth, marriage, and death dates and accompanying documentation. I even have copies of a couple of letters she wrote to her oldest son and his wife and a poem written by her third oldest daughter. But I didn’t know her. I never […]
Archives for January 2018
Longevity: The Hopkins Siblings Had It
Considering that life expectancy is currently 78.6 years,1 the longevity of Jim and Cindy’s children is remarkable. The average age of their nine children who lived past infancy was 83.4 years. James Arton Hopkins and Lucinda Howard married on Christmas Day 1885 in Harlan County, Kentucky. Their 10 children were born between 1886 and 1906. The youngest […]
Favorite Photo: Elmer D. Looking Sharp
This photo appears in several other posts here, but when I saw “Favorite Photo” on the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks list of prompts, it was the first thing that came to mind. I think I squealed with delight when I first found this picture while scanning an aunt’s photos about 15 years ago. It […]
How I Was Named
How often do you hear the advice “don’t forget to write about your own life while documenting the family history?” I don’t think I’ve ever written a blog post about me, and this one isn’t technically about me. It’s about how I was named. Daddy’s uncle, James Bailey Hankins, lived in Los Angeles and worked […]
Start: Why I’m a Genealogist
Emma Ewers Taylor Hopkins was responsible for my start in genealogy, even though it didn’t happen until 24 years after she died. Becoming a genealogist was the last thing on my mind when I picked up my maternal grandmother’s fill-in-the-blanks family tree book in 2002. I hadn’t seen it since I looked at it around […]
2018: Planning for a New Year
Well, here I am again at the beginning of a new year writing about not getting much genealogy done last year and hoping this year will be different. There is one major difference between 2018 and the past three or four years. I don’t have a major volunteer project that will eat up big chunks […]