Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - An Ancestor's School Records

 From Randy (my cousin) over at Genea-Musings:

it's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun!!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1)  Do you have any records of your ancestors' schooling, such as report cards, yearbooks, or photos?

2)  If so, please share one (or more) of them and what you learned about your ancestor(s) from them.

3) Please share your post or information as a comment or in your own blog post!

(Thank you to Lisa S. Gorrell for this SNGF idea.)

Here's mine:

Well, since I always have to be extra, I'm going to post about four different people, my great-grandmother, Bessie Alice Carter Ranney (1883-1960); my grandmother, Ethel Irene Ranney Tapley (1913-1973); my mother, Linda Irene Tapley (1942-); and myself (1967-)!

Bessie grew up in Eagle Grove, Iowa.  Following are images of her 1901 High School Graduation Booklet.

    

For my grandmother, a page out of her 1932 Redlands (California) High School Yearbook.  My mother nor I had any idea Ethel was in Glee Club!  We certainly did not inherit any singing ability from her, unfortunately.

My mother was in the 1st Grade at Glenwood in Los Angeles.  Here is her report card from the first semester that year (1948-49). (I believe I got a hold of this when I was a child and added or tried to subtract some check marks from the Subjects section!)  I see she got outstanding marks in Effort and Cooperation.

With her 5th grade class in 1953 in Mentone, California:

Here's my pretty mother in June 1962 when she graduated from San Bernardino Valley College in San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, California.

Finally, here I am in my cap and gown when I graduated from Swainsboro High School, Swainsboro, Georgia in 1985.

I like to share the 4 of us because it is amazing to me how much we all look alike!  The genes are strong on my maternal side!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - The Star of my own Who Do You Think You Are? Show

 From Randy (a cousin discovery!!) over at Genea-Musings:

it's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun!!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

(1)  Pretend that you are one of the subjects/guests on the Who Do You Think You Are? TV show on the NBC network.

(2)  Which of your ancestors (maximum of two) would be featured on your hour-long episode? What stores would be told, and what places would you visit?

(3)  Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, in a post on Facebook, or on Twitter.  

Here's mine:

(1)  Pretend that you are one of the subjects/guests on the Who Do You Think You Are? TV show on the NBC network.

"Liz Tapley is a blogger and genealogist who has been researching her family history since she was a child! Despite having over 19,000 relatives in her Family Tree Maker database, she is still chasing that one elusive ancestor..."

(2)  Which of your ancestors (maximum of two) would be featured on your hour-long episode? What stores would be told, and what places would you visit?

    (a)  Genealogists from the United States and Germany would explore the mystery that is the early life of Liz's 2nd great-grandfather, George W. Schwalls Sr (1838-1908).  

        * Seemingly just appearing in the United States in the 1850s... how did he get to this country?  Who did he travel with?  How did he end up in rural south Georgia?

        * Is the George Michael Schwall living in the next county over his cousin?

        * What village/town/city was he from in Germany?  Who were his parents? Grandparents?

        * After only being in the U.S. for no more than five years, he fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side.  What was his motivation?  What was that time like for him?  

During the course of the show, I would visit Johnson County, Georgia to see where George lived and raised his children... then I would go to Germany and visit the any and all locations the professional genealogists have found that bring me closer to knowing George and his family's history.  As an aside, I would definitely want to be driven everywhere I visit, especially in Germany where I am not familiar with the ways of the road.  

Now I believe the search for George's family would take the entire hour of the show.  But if not...

    (b)  Information about the adoption of my great-grandmother, Bessie Carter Ranney (1883-1960).

        *  Perhaps through DNA, professional genealogists can find out the identity of her birth parents.

        * Did her adoptive parents, Charles Kelso Carter (1843-1916) and Sarah Schoonover Carter (1840-1918) know their daughter's' birth parents?

I would visit Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Bessie was born and Eagle Grove, Iowa where she grew up.  Since my mother and I have discovered through DNA testing that we have Scandinavian roots, which could only have come from Bessie, perhaps the show will take me to Norway or Denmark!

Family Recipe Friday: Brown Bread

 

"Brown Bread

Set sponge as for white bread

when light mix hard with

graham flour let raise as for

white bread do not mix as hard as 

white bread

Mrs. Ed Bradford"

 

This "recipe" was stuck inside my great-grandmother's (Bessie Carter Ranney) 1929 diary that I recently transcribed here on this blog.  Obviously the recipe was not an original of my great-grandmother's.  It was written by Mrs. Bradford, a friend of Bessie's.  However, the main thing that stood out to me was not the recipe itself (which really is not much of a recipe in my opinion, probably because I've never made my own bread), but the fact that the recipe was written on a receipt from Bessie's father's jewelry business.  Charles Carter was a jeweler and a farmer in Eagle Grove, Iowa about 1900.  This find really excited me!