Sentimental Sunday: Looking for Lilabelle (Part 2)

Sentimental Sunday: Looking for Lilabelle (Part 2)

Photo collection of Hannah Tucker Champlin Broadfoot (1917-2014) inherited by Midge Frazel, 2016

In this group photo, you can see that the women are wearing the same outfits as in the last post. The two children are my first cousins and are still living. I am not sure of the oldest lady but the lady with her arms on my female cousin is Mildred May and lived up the street from my Aunt Annie. There's always more to know about photographs.

When adding Lilabell to my tree with her husband David Aiken, I sat and thought for a minute that maybe I could find out more if I put her name as Aiken and then searched. I found a tree with a woman named Lilabelle with a husband listed as "private" but living in New York. I sent the owner of the tree a message through Ancestry and asked if this Lilabelle was married to a man named David Aiken. It was a long shot.

Very quickly, I got a message back and yes, she was! This never happens, right? Lilabelle was her mother's cousin and someone she knew. I wish this worked out more often because it gave me her maiden name and her parents. Her maiden name is BUDDIE and she married David sometime after the 1940 census since both were living with parents in that census year. He enlisted in the Army in 1942 and perhaps married her after that. 

I will continue to search for more information about them but I can confidently label the photos correctly and ad them to my tree.

It pays to ask questions!

Sentimental Sunday: Looking for Lilabelle, (Part 1)

Photo collection of Hannah Tucker Champlin Broadfoot (1917-2014) inherited by Midge Frazel, 2016

Sentimental Sunday: Looking  for Lilabelle (Part 1)

Photo collection of Hannah Tucker Champlin Broadfoot (1917-2014) inherited by Midge Frazel, 2016

This was a "highly caffeinated week" as I sorted through the photos given to me by my Aunt Hannah through her cousin, Barbara. Hannah, called Tuckie by her family, lived with her cousin, Barbara, for a while after her house blew up. No one told me her house blew up but that is how it goes in families, right? Can you see why she was called Tuckie? 

Hannah was quick with the camera. She always had it with her for family outings and especially on Memorial Day. On Memorial Day my family had a party after visiting the cemetery. 

Yes, that is why I got involved with the gravestones, because you get a party after looking at gravestones.

In this batch of photos were these two separate photographs. I scanned both sides and made a collage. I took out other photos in the batch and by examining all of them together, I have determined that they were taken on Memorial Day, 1952. 

There is a lesson to be learned here. Don't drive yourself nuts trying to research family without using the telephone. I could have saved myself hours of aggravation if I had done that first. Instead I assumed that Cousin David Aiken was the son of David Aiken, Jr. and that Lilabelle was a second wife. She is NOT. My cousin told me that I had the wrong father for this David Aiken. Yes, there are a lot of men named David Aiken. 

So after finding out that THIS David Aiken was the son of Alexander Aiken, I said, "Oh, I have attached him to the wrong parents." So, I apologized to the person helping me all week and gave her the right family to put him in. I knew it was wrong. Listen to your gut feeling.

 But, who is Lilabell? 

This is why you have to be careful about family photos. I knew from looking at these two photos that Cousin Dave was probably older than my father and uncle. Notice, that my oldest aunt has linked arms with Lilabelle, indicating that she may have known Lilabell longer. We knew the photo was taken after 1951 because Hannah wrote her newly married surname on the back of the photo. Then, by looking at what the ladies are wearing, we saw the same clothes in all of the photos. Date and place (Westerly, RI) confirmed.

On to the quest for Lilabelle.... 

Feeling Sentimental About Software

Photo Collage by Midge Frazel

A long time ago, I attended a MacWorld Expo in Boston. It wasn't my first one but I don't know what year that was. Hubs drove me in to the Bayside Expo and dropped me off as he had a meeting to go to and could pick me up in the afternoon. I had a great time all by myself looking at the exhibits and taking in sessions. That's when going to a conference was a lot of fun. I rounded a corner and stopped dead. There was a booth for Reunion, a genealogy software program. I was a die-hard Mac user then and hadn't touched my genealogy notebooks in a long time. The kind salesman gave me a demo copy on a floppy disk and I spend a lot of time using it and thinking about genealogy. I was working so much then gaining a reputation as a person who taught educators how to use computers.

When I started to use Windows, I decided to buy Family Tree Maker for my Windows computer at Costco and kept the receipt to mark the occasion. 10-10-1998. I had Ancestry's first online database, Genealogy.com and then moved on to full Ancestry.com. 11 Feb 2001. I learned Personal Ancestral File (PAF) enough to teach beginners how to start their own pedigree chart and family group sheets.

I knew I needed a desktop software program to use for reports and to compare my many interrelated families. I looked for new possibilites and decided on RootsMagic and purchased version 4 on 25 April 2009. It was a wise decision as now I can also use it on my Mac laptop. Bruce is a brilliant programmer and takes suggestions and writes a dynamo manual. See this photo of me taken on vacation at Cape Cod with my RootsMagic 4 manual and my coffee? At the next NERGC, I was delighted to meet him and he gave me a new manual and signed it.

To be fair, I also use Legacy Family Tree and subscribe to their Webinars. Let's just say I love software. Always have and always will. A highly caffeinated genealogy needs coffee and software. 

I look forward to the next version of RootsMagic (and the manual) and will experiment with the syncing. I faithfully export a GEDCOM each month. I store all my citations offline. 

Feeling sentimental....