Scotch-Irish-L Archives

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Subject: [S-I] Yup, you are still on the Scotch Irish list
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:02:43 +0000 (UTC)

Hi folks, it's the end of the dog days (we hope), at least in the northern hemi . Time to wake up and do some family research.

What have you done over the summer (or winter if in the southern hemi)?

Moi ... very little! Trying to complete a book, the same book, as usual. I did

I did make contact on a non-Scotch Irish line (PA German) via Rootsweb forums. The family in question had lived in Glenshaw, PA (north of Pittsburgh). This person was working on the history of Glenshaw and had started a tree called "Glenshaw People":
http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/14613601/family/pedigree

I dislike the format of Ancestry's family trees! Not pretty. He is not related to any of these people but he has restored the house of the sister of my great great grandmother. He offered my sister and I a tour. His 'thing' is scanning photos. We brought several photo albums. The house was amazing. My mother never had figured out which of the houses in this community were Sarah Leight's. Now we knew. He gave us a tour of the whole community.

After my aunts passed away and my mother cleaned out the family home she found a collection of albums in the attic. When my great aunt passed on in 1962 apparently my grandmother got her albums. She was part of the Glenshaw community in the early 1900s. They were full of wonderful photos of a community that soon became related to one another through marriage. They were the first to discover oil on their farms so they rapidly got rich. My direct line benefited little as my great grandmother married an Irishman and was disinherited (a Protestant middle class Irishman, but this hardly mattered to this crowd).

My mother had given me years ago my great aunt's birthday book. She had inscribed in it the births, deaths, and marriages of many Glenshaw people, some born in the 1870s, on up to 1962 when she passed on. Most of the people I did not know. It had not been till my sister and I transcribed some records from a small local church that we realized these people were cousins of hers. So I had that to contribute. I transcribed the contents....where to put them on the Web!! (Probably Allegheny Co, PA.... genweb site). A few Irish and Scots names among them.

When I was little my mother did not do genealogy. After I left home for college and marriage, she began to take interest and did much work. However my sister, twenty one years younger than me, was there during most of her work. She remembered a lot. She was also around as my mother analyzed the old photo albums in the 1990s after her sisters passed on, identifying as many as she could.

In brief it was a collaborative effort like so often genealogy is. We all had something different to bring to the table. My mother died a year ago and now my sister and I can pass on what she passed on to us.

Steve scanned many of our photos and emailed them to us. I would like to scan all the albums. I am putting them into Picasa:
http://picasaweb.google.com/home . So far all I have up is my ex-s grandfather, Raymond Duncan, first wife and son. My ex descends from his second wife and her daughter. (Raymond's half Ulster Scot -- Duncans from Donegal and half Irish --Greys and O'Gormans, so he's okay!). Raymond was the brother of Isadora Duncan and an early back to nature "hippie" and author. He was arrested for child abuse in New York because his child was in sandals. Later the Duncans had a sandal shop on Cape Cod that I visited in the 1980s. Check out Raymond -- is his nose Irish or Scotch Irish??

Other than that I am moving to Linux. I used to teach admin of Unix systems so right now I'm catching up on Linux by reading lots of free ebooks. I found a few free genealogy books and lots of free e novels (so nothing much got done this summer). I have to troubleshoot a graphics card issue, ARRG. And install a router, etc, etc. Now I know what you pay Microsoft or Apple to do --create failsafe installs. Worth the money, perhaps <grin>.

I am installing a lot of open source software. Yesterday http://calibre-ebook.com/ calibre -- for managing your e-books. I now have a huge collection of PDFs, downloaded from Googlebooks, etc, that I can't keep track of. If I only spend 200 hours editing tags and titles, I will have something useful.

So my list of projects isn't getting shorter due to 'labor saving' software but longer.

So what are you doing and have found any helpful software or website?

Speaking of websites, if you have ancestors in the western part of Old Mother Cumberland, PA, aka Franklin County, see
http://franklincountypennsylvaniasurnames.com .

WOW!!!!!!! Several of the books y ou can get through the FHL or at a library. Bark if you need a lookup; probably some of us have the book or kn ow where to do a lookup. All the Kittochtinny papers are in the PA Library in Harrisburg. Last time I was there, Chambersburg did not have a complete set. They're rare. I vacuum them up with I find them -- but can't find them on my disk! Calibre might help with that<grin>.
http://www.statelibrary.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/pennsylvania_department_of_education/7237
FHL has v. 14 (1998) - v. 24, no. 8 (Nov. 2008); with some issues lacking.
It directs us to the usgenweb county site: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~pafrankl/ .

Linda Merle

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  • Re: [S-I] Yup, you are still on the Scotch Irish list by Shirley Newbold <>
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