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Follow the Women
Where I started over two years ago in genealogy research and where I am now are two very different places. My skill set for this work has steadily progressed. Still, I catch myself in frustration when I try to locate evidence of my female ancestors. When I spent a month in August of 2024 in Savannah to do some archival research, I remember being struck by how hard it was to locate the women in my family, and when I did, certain names were misspelled from year to year in directories, newspapers, and court documents. The process starts by looking…
4 min read
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Harris Neck
The name “Harris Neck” first entered my consciousness when I was a young girl visiting my grandmother. It was mentioned during trips near Savannah until her passing in 2009. Yet, as far as I can recall, I never set foot on the land of Harris Neck. Still, it had been a part of my identity long before I was born. When a relative bought a house in Florida, I made annual trips to visit. Each time I drove south on I-95, below Savannah, GA, I would pass the sign for Harris Neck US Fish & Wildlife Refuge. It was a…
4 min read
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Land
Part of learning about my family history has focused on learning the counties and towns/cities where past generations lived. My grandmother told me the earliest stories of places, but I couldn’t get a grasp beyond Savannah,GA and Hilton Head, SC: the two locations I remember the most when visiting my grandmother. On trips to Savannah, she would say she needed to take me to “Harris Neck” to show me her grandfather’s land. Anyone who has been to the Low Country of Georgia and South Carolina knows that these lands can appear identical in topography and culture: Live Oaks with streaming…
4 min read
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Starting with my Grandmother
Putting together a family “tree” is more complicated than I thought. Especially to someone who struggles with basic Excel skills or doesn’t know exactly how to manipulate a plug-in for a website (yet). After attempting some screen shots of trees from the genealogical sites I use, I decided to use Adobe Express to see if there were some templates on there. Bingo! It’s not perfect, but it will help visualize some ancestral lines. I’ll start with my grandmother, Ethel Butler Thomas Hunter. She is the main source of the family artifacts I now own. My grandmother was born in Savannah,…
4 min read
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Operating Instructions
Whenever I unbox a new gadget, I often ignore the operation manual. I usually fumble around, perform a bunch of unscripted tactics, and voila, I figure it out. Or not. Then, maybe, I pull out the instructions to witness the breadcrumbs of predictable mistakes I could have skipped had I considered the proper steps, all detailed in the manual. I have learned the hard way that some things are not operation-ready at the moment of unboxing. In my photography ventures, I have cursed myself for trying to launch programs through the Adobe suite of tools to start editing photographs without…
4 min read
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Opening the Vault
In my family, I am the unofficial keeper of the family relics. Over the past 30 years, I have also amassed a collection of imperfectly scribbled notes on strewn pieces of old yellow legal paper and notecards that have been tucked away into an old, tall file cabinet—each time staring at me to decipher their hidden codes when I put away some bills or filed work. I have a large Family Bible published by the American Bible Society in 1855 that sat in my living room untouched for years, viewed more as decoration than anything. It’s moved locations over the…
4 min read