Quote

"Great minds discuss ideas.
Average minds discuss events.
Small minds discuss people."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

And extraordinary minds discuss ideas about events involving dead people.

-andrea

Broad St. Cemetery Update

It turns out they printed my three photos in the paper! Yay! They also said that a group went and sprayed Round-Up on August 16th. They must have sprayed only one area, because my Aunt Mary's section has a few stones with weeds taller than me!

I have another trick up my sleeve which I will implement next month. I'll let you know if it keeps the weeds out. It's going to remain secret for now :)

-andrea

Letter to the editor (again)

I wrote in to the BEN Column in the Bridgeton News again. It should be in the paper tomorrow (Wed). I was down in South Jersey at my 3rd cousin 1x removed's widow's 100th birthday party. My, it was a gala affair! She was dancing and having a grand ole time. I finally got to meet several 4th cousins (and beyond) that I've been emailing for the past few years. I also changed the artificial flowers on some of my ancestors' graves.

And then.. I went to check on my cousin Ella. I've been battling Ella's weeds at the Broad Street Cemetery in Bridgeton for over 2 years. The cemetery could use better maintenance, but that's another story for another time. At least now they're mowing between the headstones and the footstones.

If any of you readers have suggestions for the weeds after looking at the pictures, I'd love to hear them!

-andrea

 Hi BEN,

Remember our little discussion last September where you thought I might be exaggerating about the waist high weeds at my cousin Ella (Blew) Rammel's plot? Then I sent you the pictures.

Well, I went back last Sunday to check on her and part of the weeds was back! This time.. it was at least chest high! I took a picture for you before I cut it down and removed the roots. I was kneeling down with my loppers and it was falling on my head.

Before I cleaned it up:

http://tinyurl.com/ellatree

This is what it looks like now: 

http://tinyurl.com/ellanotree

I'm pretty excited that they're mowing behind the stones now.

In case you were wondering, I cut down all the overgrowth last year and this is a picture of me at the plot doing some tidying in April. If you notice, there aren't any weeds growing at all.

http://tinyurl.com/ellainapril

If anyone has any suggestions on how to keep the weeds out of her plot and the surrounding plots (other Rammel folks I'm not related to, but I'd like to make the whole area nice) for someone who lives in North Jersey and can't get down there every weekend, I'd love to hear them. I am far from an expert when it comes to this type of thing.

More Letters Testamentary

I solved a longstanding genealogical mystery in Cumberland Co, NJ, last night. As you know, I've been going through the several-thousand page books of Letters Testamentary that I copied at the NJ State Archives (only 800 more pages to go!) since May.

A few days ago, I ran into a distant cousin named Andy (who also reads the blog now, yay!) on the NJCUMBER rootsweb email list. I answered a query of his since I knew the answer. Then I saw his last name matched my 3rd great grandmother's so I asked him if his surname started from Cumberland Co. It turns out, it did. His ancestor John was one of those family members that I didn't know where they belonged. Andy knew John's father, but didn't know anything else.

Last night, John was mentioned as a cousin of Sarah Dare Bateman. She died without heirs, so they listed all of her living cousins. It turns out that Jane Potter and Smith Bowen had a lot more children than are documented. Sarah's mother was Statira Bowen and no one knew who her parents were. Fortunately I recognized a grouping of children as Buckley C. Bowen and Abigail Sayre's children. I sent the page to Andy (who lives out of the country) and now he knows his ancestry!

As my cousin Mary, also a genealogist, says.. "Why don't they teach about Letters Testamentary in genealogy classes?" My answer, "They're not as obsessed as me with finding their families."

-andrea

The Eternal Value of Privacy

Of course, that statement pertains to the living. However, if you reword that, it could read...

Ethics are important because without them, genealogical information can be abused.

That's my quote of the day. Think about it.

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Ebay Winnings

This week I won the print of Mary Van Heusen (Smith) Kretschmar that I mentioned in an earlier post. Her niece Lizzie Smith lived with my cousin Mary's great grandmother's family in Philadelphia. Her great great grandfather wrote a letter home when he went out to visit Mrs. Kretschmar in St. Louis. We have no idea who Mrs. Kretschmar's parents were, but now we have the name Van Heusen from the back of the photograph and that was pretty rare for Philadelphia (where they lived before moving West).

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Blog Carnival Entry

The Carnival of Genealogy is having a Show and Tell submission, so I thought I'd write an article.

Every few days I comb ebay for anything from Bridgeton, NJ. In May 2006 I and rescued tons of letters, photos, and other documents belonging to my distant cousin [5c2r]  Marjorie Reeves Fithian. She died unmarried about 7 years before I was born. The ephemera belonged to several generations of her family as her aunts and uncles on her father's side did not have any surviving heirs. It all ended with her and ended up at a flea market in PA in the 1970's. A lady bought them and hung on to them until placing them on ebay in 2006.

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The whole story

If you see someone's World War II army enlistment records on ancestry.com and it says they had two years of high school when they enlisted, what does that mean?

A. They dropped out

or

B. They skipped two grades and graduated early

or

C. That it is an error and the real answer is anywhere from 0-4

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National Genealogical Society

inform people who provide information about their families as to the ways it may be used, observing any conditions they impose and respecting any reservations they may express regarding the use of particular items.

require some evidence of consent before assuming that living people are agreeable to further sharing of information about themselves.

convey personal identifying information about living people—like age, home address, occupation or activities—only in ways that those concerned have expressly agreed to

are sensitive to the hurt that revelations of criminal, immoral, bizarre or irresponsible behavior may bring to family members

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The gist of the law

So my question is, just because you can publish any sort of information you want on dead people, does that mean you should? When I find myself faced with this sort of dilemma, I like to pretend that that person is my grandmother. Would I do this to my grandmother? I call it the Grandma Test.

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