Copying ‘til the cows come home
September 3, 2009

Never, never again! Never again will I go anywhere to do such a thing as we are doing here. I confess that it was I who suggested we go to the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne to do research. Three straight days of doing just that brings me to 6 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon dutifully searching the stacks with surname index in hand, desperately hoping not to find anything else. It sound ridiculous, but honestly, we now have a stack of copies approximately six inches in height, and are not finished. Lawsy mercy, we have to return again tomorrow! Oh sorry, I meant to say, “Wow, what a great opportunity to get back to it on the morrow!

The real kicker in this is that we have only worked in one small section of the library, perusing only what is called the family history collection. It consists of thousands and thousands (I’m sure there’s a number somewhere but I’m too tired to care) of many otherwise unpublished or inaccessible volumes - bound copies of old rare tomes, self-published books bound by the library, out-of-print books - just seemingly miles of books.

I originally had some vague idea of “doing” that section and then moving on to some more specialized research in the other billions of records - in books, microfilm, microfiche, etc.

Granted we have found some exciting and fun stuff (good grief, I should hope so for the amount of time and money it has cost us!), but I feel just a bit too successful right now. Tomorrow will be a shorter day; we have seen the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

As always, we have found great information where we didn’t expect it, and none where lots was anticipated, or at least hoped for. We have full firsthand accounts of the capture of Catherine Dubois and her children by Indians in the 1600s and their subsequent retrieval. We got loads on our Brackens/Cantrells/McKinneys; new data on our Mayflower ancestor William Brewster. Our Elizabeth Bracken about whom we knew virtually nothing previously now sports an entire lineage through Stalcups back to Colonial New Sweden in Delaware.

We gained a ton of detailed documentation about the Coes clear back into antiquity. We discovered that we single-handedly won our independence from Britain thanks to our ancestral Cantrell and his four sons, all of whom fought and survived.

Truthfully, we are clueless about what all we have amassed (so much!) - it took all our focus just to insure that we were copying what pertained to us in each of the volumes, and hopefully not much that didn’t. And I am here to tell you that the number of ways to write incomprehensible genealogies and histories is legion. Not being close to a window through which to throw stupid, stupid, stupid books, I was sometimes forced to wheedle Chris into figuring out the worst of them. It made him feel important and smart and besides, it was easier that way (I think it’s called codependent).

Fort Wayne, Matt, business . . .

We’ve enjoyed downtown Fort Wayne, a mishmash of modern and historic, a melange of residential, commercial and industrial. One day we walked to J.K. O’Donnell’s, where we enjoyed a good Irish lunch in an impressively appointed restaurant. The next we stopped across the street to sample excellent pizza while soaking up sunshine at the sidewalk tables. Today, we ate our packed sandwiches outdoors on the library grounds in yet another perfectly clear moderate temperatured day. This weather makes up for a lot of what we endured last summer.

I love the live hedged welcome “signs” to the city, so we stopped to snap a photo this morning - how uniquely charming - but a bit hard to get a good perspective for photographing (without standing in traffic, that is).

Last night we found Matt of gravestone restoration fame and were able to get him paid for fixing the McKinneys’ stones. What a sweet guy he is - even repaired one in the family that we hadn’t requested because she wasn’t an ancestor (can’t very well pay to restore the entire cemetery after all) and didn’t charge us. We were sorry to hear that he was injured by a falling tombstone, and is recovering in a wheelchair from surgery. It threw him out of work for the whole summer of great working weather, so he will be happy to receive our payment.

We located him the second time same as the first: through Spencer-Williamson Funeral Home who knows about him because of the owner’s wife being on the County Cemetery Board. Matt had originally counseled us to wait a bit before having the work done; Jay County was considering popping for restoration of the whole burying ground, but alas, they decided against it for now. The counties here do that on a fairly regular basis.

Chris found a Chase Bank here that enabled us to begin working on Dad’s estate stuff. We don’t bank with them, but Dad did and since we have been handling his affairs for years, we have become acquainted with them. The one here was equally as impressive as the one in Chino Valley insofar as customer service, the like of which one seldom sees any more.

We love Country Bank for the same reason; this is over the top, however, especially when you consider they’ve never seen us before and never will again (at least not after I take back the magazine I borrowed today). We won’t be able to do much more until we get home except I should order his stone, just been putting it off. If we were home, we’d have to be clearing out his mobile and all that stuff I’d rather not do, so happy to defer it for a while.

Chris was excited about getting a photo of the nearly full moon this evening after we got home.

More actual plans: stay here through Tuesday, take an extra day in Kentucky for further exploration of the Cumberland Pass area, and get to North Carolina on Friday. That will be two days of driving with one of fun in the middle, then finally we get to Mom and Dad’s.