I didn’t mean to let so much time go by since my last post. We had some welcome rain the other day. You can’t really see it in this photo, but at the time the wind was whipping the trees around, and the rain was really peppering down. We need rain badly here in So. Carolina. The neighboring towns are beginning to curb watering yards. Ours hasn’t yet, but it will, no doubt, before the summer is over. Anyway, we enjoyed the rain, and I hope we’ll get more before too long.
Genealogy
I got involved in doing some genealogy, and I ran out of time to do anything about the blog. When access to some military files came up for free until the D-Day anniversary on Ancestry, I wanted to take advantage of it. I was disappointed that my dad’s records weren’t there. Three of his brothers’ enlistment files are there, and another’s cemetery file is there, but there’s not a single record pertaining to my dad. Since that fire in 1973 got his records, I guess officially, he wasn’t in World War II. Absolutely ridiculous.
I also got back a response to an inquiry I’d made about my dad’s records and those of my grandfather’s. They had nothing in them. So I guess that route is out. There’s still a chance I might get information on my grandfather since he was injured during WWI and in the hospital. I suppose all I’d get would be health information, but I might try to get that yet.
I did find a lot of interesting things, though. I found my other grandfather’s signature. He died when I was a baby, and I didn’t have his signature on anything. It was on his registration card for WWI. Now, he was forty-seven at the outbreak of WWI, and I’d have never thought he had had to register, but he did. I just lucked into that. I recognized his name in the list I got one day. I also got an image of the page that showed my great-grandfather was at Camp Douglas, Illinois, as a prisoner of war and when he was taken and released. I couldn’t be happier about that. I had the files that I’d ordered thirty years ago, but that image wasn’t in them.
Also I found tons of things on my husband’s family, even some photos we didn’t have. We’d been stuck on that line, because nobody could remember his great-grandfather’s name. I thought I found them sometime back, but I wasn’t positive. Their name is quite common, and there were hundreds of them in Pennsylvania at that time. Turns out, what I had found was right, and I took their line back to 1814. That’s not very far, but it’s light years away from where it was. I unexpectedly got his grandfather’s registration card for WWI, and a lot of military files on his ancestors. His family all thought they didn’t come over here until after the Civil War, but they were here long before and were ardent Union soldiers. Some of them died in the conflict.
Another of my husband’s lines fell into my lap. I got them back to the 1600’s. I love it when I stumble into something like that. So now, we have to get the information to my father-in-law and one of my husband’s aunts. They’re both elderly now, and this has been interesting to them to hear about it on the phone. It will mean more when they see the details, though.
So the genealogy took up a lot of time, but I feel a lot better about it now. My dream come true would be to find more about my great-great grandfather on my mother’s side. I am stuck on him, and I guess I always will be. He was Arno L. Harris born in 1822 in Louisiana, and I am unable to go anywhere with him. He died in Ellis Co., Texas in 1868 when my great-grandfather was only seven, and he didn’t remember much about him in his later years. So I’m still working on that line–most unprofitably. I’ve traced most of his children, but my great-grandfather was the only son who lived very long or who had a family, so what they knew depended on him, and he was a leaky bucket. Genealogy is a black hole. You get into it, and you can’t get out.
So all that took up a lot of May and the start of June; then I had a birthday in there. No big deal, but getting to my age takes a person back a bit. It took me a while to recover from that.
Knitting
I did manage to finish my turquoise socks. This was the Socks That Rock yarn. You recall I had a problem in that the two skeins weren’t the same dye lot, and I decided to mingle them so that the socks would look similar. I think the result was good, and I like the socks very much. I must say, I hate doing one sock at a time. I finished the first one in record time once I decided to mingle the yarns, but the second one was no fun, and I hated doing it. Once I do a pattern, I don’t really like repeating it.
Here’s a detail of the stitch pattern I used:
It’s a Japanese pattern I came across, and I just plugged it into my standard sock pattern. These are done toe up, of course. I just did the standard heel stitch on this pair, and I used the sewn cast off from Elizabeth Zimmerman for the top of the 2X2 ribbing. I find that cast off is the best. I like the stretchiness of it, and it holds its shape too.
Reading
I’ve read several books since I last spoke with you, but I can’t tell you now what books they were. Oh, one was Died in the Wool: A Knitting Mystery by Mary Kruger. I’d read it before, but I didn’t realize it until I’d gotten almost halfway through it. I hate it when I do that.
I’m reading Nicholas Sparks’ True Believer now. It’s a little slow-moving, but I am enjoying it.