Sunday ScanDay May 18

There is a facebook group called Sunday Scanday created by Caroline Marshall Pointer author of the blog 4YourFamilyStory.com Each Sunday she creates an event on her group page and we all join in for an hour of scanning.  The consistency of an event like this is great to get those endless piles of old family photos, letters or proofs scanned that you have been meaning to get around to.

My grandfather, James Newport King of Portsmouth, VA wrote to my grandmother Thelma Foster almost everyday and sometimes twice a day when he was on business trips back in the 1920's.  I had put these letters in page protectors years ago but now I'd like to have digital copies so my brothers and sister can have copies of the letters too.

James Newport King

b. 19 Feb 1896 d. 7 Dec 1958

Portsmouth, VA

Using a Microfilm Reader

Searching for ancestors on the internet is easy and convenient however not every historical document  has been digitized and put out on the world wide web.  Before the internet genealogists depended on published sources, microfilm and microfiche that they could only search through in a library.

The current project I am working on is documenting a Revolutionary War ancestor from Virginia for the Daughters of the American Revolution.  I live in Texas and cannot just go to Virginia and look up these documents.  However some documents can come to me via interlibrary loans.  Last week I got a notice from my library that the microfilm I requested was in.  I was so excited to see what I would find.

I had requested the church records from the First Presbyterian Church in Portsmouth, VA.  They were available on a microfilm reel which I had to view on a Microfilm reader.

A microfilm can have up to 600 images which usually is not indexed.  You basically have to start with the first image and look at each image one by one.  It took me three hours to go through the whole thing but it paid off.  I found the baptism record for my 3rd great grandfather and the death record for his mother.  The librarian told me I could save the images I wanted straight to my flash drive or make hard copies for 10 cents a page.

Hope all your days are successful too!
Until next time, happy hunting!
Kristina

Asking Mom About Her Side of the Family

If you are new to genealogy I hope you will take the advice of all those gene gurus and ask family members about the family members you don't know.  The little tidbits you pick up in their stories are great clues for further research.  Case in point: here is what happened to me today.

I was with mother and asked her a few questions about her side of the family.  I have been doing a lot of work on my Ancestry.com tree and discovered some family members I didn't know much about.  We were talking about her father who died in 1958, ten years before I was born.  I new he had a brother "Palmer" and a nephew "LP" but I didn't know any stories about their lives.  So mom said Palmer was the head of the local paper in Portsmouth, VA called The Portsmouth Star and when she was little if her daddy didn't have his paper when he woke he would call his brother and ask "Lewis where is my paper?"  And Palmer would send a boy over to their house with the paper.  Mom said they always referred to each other by their formal names.  We talked about James Auther King too.  James A was another one of Palmer's son.  Now I knew Jimmy.  He was a priest and we would always visit him when we traveled to Virginia.  The last time I saw him was 2002 when mom and I went to visit her best friend Lynn at Virginia Beach, VA.  James' niece Nancy King Rinick sent mom a picture of the family that attended his funeral but she doesn't recognize any of the faces.  I would like to make contact with Nancy if I can to find some of the names.

This is Rev James Arthur King and the family.

Birth 11 Aug 1929 in Charlotte, NC

Death 27 April 2006 in Richmond, VA

Priest at St. Paul's Petersburg, VA

Until then, Happy Hunting

Kristina