June Heat (30 Jun 2012)

(Originally posted 30 June 2012)

Hope everyone is doing well on this summer afternoon. It is hot hot hot here in the SC lowcountry. The monstrous bubble of heat that was sitting over the middle of the country earlier in the week has moved over us and is giving us temperatures near 100 this afternoon. Luckily, our AC is working OK! We went out to the beach yesterday evening for a short swim, and that helped a little with the idea of the heat, if not with the actual temperature 😉 At any rate, I am glad to be sitting here at my ‘puter and not slaving away doing yard work or some other outside activity.

I am now a third of the way through the National Genealogical Society Home Study Course on American Genealogy, and looking forward to starting on the next lesson. I still have some reading to do before starting on the assignments, which involve church and cemetery records. I have everything I need except a map of Walls Baptist Church Cemetery in Rutherford County. I need to write the church and see if they have any sort of record that I could match up with a Google Earth photo of the graveyard. I’ll try to get that letter written this weekend.

Now it’s time to hit the ol’ TMG program and continue extracting data from the latest issue of the Bulletin of the Old Tryon County Genealogical Society. The article I’m working on deals with the family of one John Bridges who lived on Grog Creek in Rutherford County, NC. Some of you who have done work in Rutherford County may be familiar with a book by Stephen Collis Jones and published in 1920 titled “The Hamrick Generations,”, which we all refer to as The Hamrick Book. After making some leaps of faith in the early generations, Jones did an excellent job, except in a few isolated cases, of documenting the family connections of many of the early Rutherford County families, including that of Grog Creek John Bridges. Trouble is, all he included was names and relationships… no dates at all. Early on in my research, I extracted the data from that book into my database and continue to add dates and places as I come across them. This OTCGS article on John Bridges supplies dates of birth, death, and marriages, and sometime gives the cemeteries where some of the folks were buried. So there is a lot of data to extract from the 10 pages contained in the article. Gotta get to it, because the next article, titled “The Braddy/Brady Bunch,” actually contains data on Lovelaces which married into the Braddy family.

So much to do, so little time….
Need a fresh pot o’ coffee [_]7