I've Got So Much To Do I Don't Know What To Do Next!!!!

This is where I’m at today:

I’m overwhelmed with all the information I have to organize.

I’m waiting for bits and pieces of information I’ve requested to arrive so I can  “finish” my father’s story before I was born.  I have tons of photos to scan, information to compile and thoughts to remember so I can write about his life after I was born.  I also have a few questions left to ask my mother about him.  Then I’ll put the story of Ray Rowe away and focus on another ancestor.  Next in line is his father, Fred Oliver Rowe.

Meanwhile, I’ve also got starts and no finishes to many other ancestral write-ups laying around my office, including those on my mother’s side of my tree, and I’ve got piles of notes and documents and photos that need to be filed away in their appropriate ancestor’s file.

I want to keep searching for stuff (it’s so exciting to find new information), but I feel like I first need to organize the stuff I have.

And, of course, I’ve broken one of the major rules in genealogy . . . I have kept horrible record logs!

So where do I go from here?

As “organized” as I am (I can find anything I am looking for, my filing cabinets ARE organized) I have tons of information that needs to be compiled in an enjoyable, interesting and readable format.  All information that I have sourced and proven beyond a reasonable doubt is in my electronic family tree (I use Legacy Family Tree).  I’m a hands-on, I-want-to-read-it-on-paper sort of person, so everything is also printed out.  However, it’s not perfectly written and graphically pleasing to my final expectations.  So that needs to happen.

I keep saying I have to “finish” the research first.  But, as every genealogist knows, the research is never finished.

This past January (11 months ago!) I made a resolution to start putting the ancestral books together.  I started with the easiest one first, the one that I thought was a simple, there’s-not-much-there-so-I-can-complete-what-I’ve-got-until-I-have-time-to-move-on family.  It was on my mother’s side, so I won’t go into depth about it here, but what happened was the more I researched their settlement area’s history, and the more I found out about each family member, the larger the project became, and it was truly not a simple project to complete!  The book is done . . . for now.  But in the process I found more leads and more stories that I want to expand on at a later time, plus I found more ancestors in that line to research.  It’s killing me not to get back to it, but I need to write up and organize a graphically-organized book for each of my family groups first.  Then, I can go and insert new information and more details to the different groups at a later time.  But if I continue to research the new stuff I find as I’m compiling, I’ll never get away from each individual family group.

It’s a monumental project, but what’s the point of doing all this research if I can’t share it in a way my descendants can enjoy it?  (By the way, that simple book I started in January took until April 1st to complete!  Three full months!  And I could go back and continue another three months just adding the additional information I found during the process!)

So that’s where I am at now.  I’m going to complete (with information I’ve got now) those books!

Most of my many genealogy site subscriptions have run out, which makes this a perfect time to put together what I have!  I’m fighting with myself not to renew them, but by not doing so, I won’t be side-tracked by researching on sites for more information to file away and stay in a holding tank for the day to come to write it up.

So, I’ll scan the hundreds of pictures I have and organize them on my computer for safe keeping.  (I like to put the originals in my books, in acid-free protectors.  We should be able to enjoy the original photos, right?)

I’ll write little vignettes about my ancestor’s lives, and if I can’t narrow specific stories down, I’ll research the area and other people who lived where and when they did and then write a synopsis of what their lives were “probably” like.

I’ll include census records and other records I come across for verification and graphic appeal, along with (hopefully) photos of everyone.

I’ll put together mini-research trips to investigate any holes I have in the stories to try and fill them up.  (Oops?  Isn’t that what I said I wouldn’t do?  Get more stuff BEFORE I organized everything I had?)

And, obviously, as one relative leads me to others, I’ll follow all trails.  Later, though.  Did I say I need to complete those books first?

Starting with my father.  Simple, right?  Back to paragraph one of this blog!

(And, of course, I will allow myself to be side-tracked here and there for variety’s sake!)

Top shelf--just some of the books I need to fill--
at least I got the "spine labels" on some of them!

My Research for High School Stories about Ray Rowe

This fall I decided to refocus my genealogy research on my closest relatives—my mother and father.  Since this blog site is about the Lines of Rowe, I will be documenting what I’m doing here as I discover more about Ray Rowe, my father, before moving on to his parents (Fred Oliver Rowe and Cora May Kellogg) and his siblings.  Then I’ll go back to working with the more distant ancestors whom I’ve already started doing research on.

Obviously I knew my dad, but it was a long time ago.  He died in 1965.  So I, like everyone else who is still alive and knew him, have to dig deep into my memory files to try and uncover the stories about him and our everyday life together as a family.  I will start doing that, but, I also need to fill in the gaps about his earlier life, before I was born, and that is not so easy.

There is a reason genealogists tell you to work with who and what you know first!  Your family will not be around forever, and in my case, I was too young to “record” the stories my father may have told, or ask him the questions I now want to ask him before he died.

All my father’s siblings have also passed.  I can get some information about his life from my mother from about 1949 when my parents met and married until his death, but my mother is 87 years old now and her memory isn’t all that sharp.  So I ask simple questions and try to keep to only one subject (and question) per conversation.  Occasionally I get something I can use, but how accurate is it when it was so hard to recall?  

And just when did my childhood memories start?  To help me recall what I can I’ll look through photo albums and play the old home movies I still have.  I'll talk with my sister and hopefully I will be able to put together some stories that are accurate.

In the meantime, what do I do and where do I look to find information before 1949?  

My father was a marine serving in World War II, and I have his discharge papers and a few photographs.  I have requested his service records and upon receipt of them I will hopefully have an idea about his service time.  

I also have some early photos of his friends and family, his birth, marriage, and death certificates, and some newspaper articles about him.

Ray Rowe enlisted with the Marines on 6 November 1942—just five months after his graduation,  so I thought while I’m waiting for the service records to arrive, I should attempt to get some information about his high school years, and, with a little luck, I might be able to get information about his earlier school years while I’m at it.

I know my father graduated from West Branch High School in 1942.  I have a photograph of him in his graduation gown, his senior class group picture, his individual senior photograph and his diploma.  So, just for fun, I decided to check out if the high school had a website and, if they did, what information it contained.  What a great idea that was, if I do say so myself! 

On September 26, 2013 I found the West Branch High School Alumni website! 

There was a wonderful story about the class and their senior skip day that gave me an inside look to what was going on at that time.  The class had saved all their hard-earned money for years to put toward a great senior trip to Detroit, only to have their plans shattered by the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the United States entering World War II.  Now the class had to find someplace closer than Detroit to go to because of the rationing of gas and tires.  Farmers were issued extra gas rations, and the class used those extra rations to get to their new destination—Houghton Lake—25 miles away!

After reading the entire account, I thought, I wonder if anyone remembers my dad and what, if anything, they remember about him.

The Website Host, Mary Anne Whitchurch Tuck—Class of 1953, posted on the website’s “home page” that she was available for questions, suggestions, or information.  So . . . 

I sent an email to her and asked if she could pass on my name and address to the 1942 alumni, or if could she provide me with any of their contact information.  I explained to her I was trying to recreate my father’s school years, and I was hoping that a few of them might remember my father and, if so, I wanted to know what they remembered about him.  She so kindly responded (almost immediately!) that she was sending me a list of the class with the addresses of who were still alive (there were 22 of them).

Next, I wrote a form letter to be sent to each class member.  I realized that they would all be in their late eighties, so I tried to make it as simple and easy as I could to get a response.  My letter introduced me, told them my dad was in their graduating class, and included a request that if they could remember anything at all about him—good or bad, to please write one sentence about him.  I printed his graduation picture at the bottom of the letter hoping it would help them to remember him.

I also included a sheet of paper with several questions that might trigger a memory (I only asked them for one memory) and gave them a spot to write it on.  I had a check box at the top to check for those who did not remember him.  I included a self-addressed, stamped envelope, again, trying to make this as easy as I could for them to respond.

Well, it worked!  So far, I’ve gotten five responses from those who did not remember him at all (a couple of them in nursing homes with dementia, and the responses came from their children who were kind enough to try and get them to remember).  Seven people have responded that they did remember him, and each of them stated that he was quiet and shy—so maybe that’s the reason the others couldn’t remember him!  I'm hoping to hear from more, but I consider 12 responses out of 22 an excellent return.

What have I learned about my father when he was in high school?

• Dad was very shy and quiet.  He was polite.
• Dad was "kind of a loner."
• He was smart.
• He was laid back.
• He was a tall, thin farm boy.
• He rarely, if ever, went to any school activities.
• He rode the Clement bus to high school.

Ray Rowe on Graduation Day

A lot of my information came from the lady who wrote the class trip article on the alumni site.  Because the class was so small, everyone knew each other, and she didn’t think he attended West Branch High School before his senior year, but transferred in from another school from Gladwin County.  He was one of the “farm” boys who was able to get extra gas rations and therefore could take a carload of students to Houghton Lake on their Senior Class Trip.  She sent me a picture of him walking through town with two other students (a back view, but at least it was labeled in her scrapbook that it was him!).

I also heard from another woman who remembered him well, mostly as being very good looking (she was only 16 at graduation) and she was very fond of him.  She didn’t do anything socially with him and only knew him through the class and school activities.  But from the tone of her note . . . well, I remember being a teenager dreaming about being with a cute boy!

Another response came from a fellow genealogist, the niece of one of Dad’s former classmates who is now in a nursing home with dementia.  She had no children from her marriage and this niece is in charge of her affairs.  This kind woman said she kept working with her aunt to try and remember dad but had no success.  So she took it upon herself to research at the school, the library, the local historical  newspapers, and the historical society, hoping to find an old yearbook or records or something where there might be a picture of dad in a school sport or other activity.  She didn’t have any success, but did duplicate a photo of the high school, along with a photo of the community building where the graduation took place (both buildings have since been torn down and re-built), and from her aunt’s records I got a copy of the commencement program, a class picture, the graduation announcement and my father’s name card.  Talk about going above and beyond!  She even said she’d keep searching for me . . . what an amazing community of genealogists we have out there!

As I’m writing this and putting together the high school portion about my father in his life story, I have to remember to get as much information as I can NOW from my mother about her school years.  I also need to write about my school years!  If my descendants are as curious about my life today as I am about my ancestors lives, this is the least I can do for them!

This experience reinforces the importance of getting those stories about your family immediately—interview, interview, interview—all your living relatives, as well as their friends, co-workers and acquaintances, especially the older ones!  Although I have scrapbooks and photo albums from some of my ancestors, photography wasn’t as easy or cheap as it is today, and the “scrapbooking” and “journaling” wasn’t as thorough and prevalent as it is now.  So we all have to remember to keep recording our present for the future, at the same time we continue to investigate and record the past that we’re in the process of researching.

And—use every and any resource you can think of to do this.  The people you’re questioning might be in their upper eighties and nineties, and they might not remember everything you want to know, but there may just be a couple of them that DO remember something, if only just a little bit, to help you put together that story you’re searching for about an ancestor.

October 20, 2013--We Finally Begin Blogging Our Lines Of Rowe!

How does one start a genealogy blog?  From the beginning?  We started researching over 40 years ago—before blogs and Internet genealogy.  So, no.  We’re not starting there.

But, we are going to go forward blogging our experiences, and we welcome anyone and everyone to contact us if they have any information, photographs, leads, whatever, that will help reconstruct the family Lines of Rowe.  (See our lines on the right.)

Who are we?  Kim Simpson and Carol Collins . . . aka Rowe first cousins.  Our dads were brothers, Ray Rowe and Robert Hugo Rowe (two of the nine children of Fred Oliver Rowe and Cora Mae Kellogg).

Now what?

We have made many a genealogical mistake in the previous years.

• We failed to start with our “living” relatives first in the excitement of finding our ancestors before them. 
• We didn’t ask questions. 
• We didn’t put together their lives. 

And now we’re paying the price.  Our generation, along with our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren are the only ones who are alive now.  So here we are, left to reconstruct the lives of our grandparents and those who raised us.

So this is how we’ll start blogging—from where we are at today.  We’ll blog our accomplishments and our mistakes as we go forward.  This will become our diary of exploration, the ups and downs of what we find or do not find.  We’ll do it all at the risk of embarrassment of exposure in this blog!

So here goes. 

We’ll start with our latest research trip. 

Our first trip was a disaster, well, not really, but we had never done one and didn’t have a “plan.”  We just went and searched for anything and everything we could.  And we were successful.  We got headstone photos and some documents from a county building.  Future trips were more organized, as we became more experienced.  And now, it is our hope that we can look most professional as we head out on research . . .

Enter a couple weeks ago.  Hmmmm.  Our plan:

Friday:  Land records in Gladwin County, Michigan. 

Okay.  So let’s combine it with a visit to Carol’s cabin, in Gladwin County.  We take a couple days off work (we know county courthouses are not available on weekends).  The weather is supposed to be perfect, and the colors are starting to turn.  A perfect fall getaway trip and the ability to progress on our Rowe genealogy.  So, we’re all set.  Plans are made.  Kim and husband drive to the cottage on Thursday afternoon and us cousins prepare for a full Friday of research.

Oops!  We failed to call the county building to verify the office we needed was open on a Friday.  It wasn’t.

No problem.  Thanks to electronic records and the web, we knew by the 1930 and 1940 census where they lived.  We just needed to find it.

Oops!  When talking with Carol’s brothers (who live in Gladwin as well), their father had taken them each there and the property they saw was NOT where the census said the Rowe’s lived.  Which was correct?  Both brothers, separately, described the same place as the family farm.  Neither of them knew anything about the property the census showed they lived on.  So, we decided to check out the property the brothers saw and deep six the census location at the present time.

So off we went to photograph the property today—unfortunately the old family farm was no longer there.  It was interesting property, however, and we also got photos of the Clement Township Hall, as it used to be the school where Robert went (before restoration).  That was it.

We then decided to check out the antique stores in West Branch, Ogemaw County.  Clement Township abuts Ogemaw County so maybe, just maybe, there’d be some old photos or something.  Nothing.  But—the historical museum was open—for 20 more minutes by the time we got there.  There wasn’t a lot to help us there, since the Rowes lived in Gladwin County.  However, the curator of the museum went digging through mountains of stuff trying to help us find something.  And she did.  I walked away with a photograph of the high school my father, Ray Rowe, attended, the way it looked the year he attended it.  So, there’s one “success.” (For some reason he graduated from West Branch High School even though they lived in Gladwin County.)

The curator also helped us verify that the Gladwin Historical Museum was open on Saturday, so that became our next day’s destination.

Next stop, the West Branch library.  The “genealogy” corner was sparse, and they did not have a high school yearbook from 1942.  So, we were done in West Branch.

That was it.  A nice, pretty drive, though. Oh, and we stopped by the Edwards Township Cemetery in Ogemaw County and photographed our Aunt Doris and Uncle Jesse’s graves on the way home.  Jesse Marcelous Rowe was another brother to Ray and Robert.

Saturday:  Off to the Gladwin Historical Museum.

A beautiful museum, with a lot of displays and records, but it had nothing that could help us with specific details.  We talked to Bruce Guy from the Gladwin County Genealogical Society, who was managing the museum for the day, and he was most cordial and helpful. 

Bruce was in the process of putting together a World War II book about veterans from Gladwin County.  He had both our father’s names, but no other information about them.  And he had not really seen any information about the Rowe’s in any of his Gladwin County research.  We know they were in the county about 30-40 years, and that they were poor farmers, so we weren’t surprised.  He took our names, our father’s (and grandparents) names, and said he’d keep his eye out for information.  And we agreed to send him the service information we had about our fathers.

Bruce was also the library director, and he informed us that the genealogy room was not open on Saturdays.

Oops.  We should have checked the library hours. 

We did go to the war memorial down the street, found our father’s names, and photographed them.

Gladwin County War Memorial

World War II names on Memorial

That was it.

Lessons Learned: 

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS do your pre-research trip homework and planning.  This time it was no big deal as we were just “getting together” in the area anyway, and thought we could cross something off our list.

BUT:  Even when you don’t do your homework, you can always find something.  Dig deep into records, even ask to see those that aren’t around in front of you, and look through all the photos and papers and scrapbooks and displays.  You might find a piece to your puzzle, even if it is just a small one (like a photo of the local high school back in 1942).  Be cordial and friendly to the museum curators and librarians and antique dealers and county employees.  Talk with them about what you know and what you’re looking for, and show an interest in what they’re doing and what projects they’re working on.  You never know who might have information you can use, or what you have that might help them!

A day after our trip to the Gladwin County Historical Museum, we had an email from Bruce Guy, who, after we left him, so generously searched the Gladwin County historical papers and sent us nine pages of articles from them that mentioned the Rowe family.  So now we have something to start recreating their lives!  But, another well-planned trip will be made to discover the land records of the Rowes.

So was this trip a success?  Absolutely!

Thank you Bruce Guy, for all your help, research and everything you have done (especially your work documenting the Gladwin County veterans)!

And thank you, Dear Myrtle, for the webinars you’ve done through Legacy Family Tree and their webinars so we can finally join this century and blog!!!!!  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dear Myrtle, find her blog at: http://blog.dearmyrtle.com .

Looking forward to blogging our Lines of Rowe,

Carol (Rowe) Collins
and

Kimberly (Rowe) Simpson