For this week's post, I am introducing a new prompt: Side-by-Side Sunday. In family history, we often look for the threads that bind us together, but sometimes the most revealing stories are found in the spaces where we drifted apart. For this inaugural Side-by-Side Sunday, I am laying out the final records of my great-grandparents. By placing their death certificates and their shared headstone next to one another, we see a vivid picture of two people who shared a homeland and a family, yet ended their journeys in very different worlds.
This week, as we observe National Agriculture Week, I am looking closer at the life of Sidney D. Rogers (1865–1924). His records illustrate the grit required to sustain a family in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sidney’s relationship with the land was one of lifelong labor, beginning in the wake of family loss and ending with a surprising professional shift in his final years.
This weekend I was cleaning up and organizing my genealogy files. Part of that collection included a cache of newspaper clippings I had downloaded during a free weekend on Newspapers.com. It turns out that my wife's grandmother, Mary Marjorie Voorhees (born March 16, 1908), was frequently mentioned in the Richmond Times-Dispatch during the late 1920s and '30s. One of those clippings, a delightful society notice from 1927, really caught my attention and I knew I had to write a post about it to share it.
In my last post, we used census records, tax records, and estate sales to bridge the gap between my wife's ancestor Daniel Epps and his brother William. By applying the principle of genealogical proof by close association, we didn't just find a father; we found a hero.
If the story of our family began as a faded sketch, the most vibrant stroke of color was added in the spring of 1781. In the world of the American Revolution, "Continental Blue" was more than just a uniform color; it was the hue of a new identity. While many Halifax militiamen like Moses Epps fought in their everyday linen hunting shirts, they stood under the banner of the Blue and Buff.
Moses didn't just witness history; he marched directly into the smoke of the The Seige of Yorktown. In this post, we look at the "Blue" in our family palette—the service of a man who risked his life for a nation that was still just a theory on parchment.
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| Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, October 19, 1781, marking the capture of more than 7,000 British and Hessian troops; copy of a lithograph by James Baillie, ca. 1845. Courtesy of the National Archives (National Archives Identifier 532883). |
I’ve written before about the day my great-grandfather, Ludvig Amandus Olsen, lost his life. It’s a story defined by a split-second tragedy—a falling steel rod on a Brooklyn pier in January 1930. (Link HERE) But lately, I’ve been looking past that single day and focusing on the quiet, grueling survival story that followed for my great-grandmother, Gulborg, and her five children.
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| Arthur, Irving, Gulborg, Clifford, Ethel and Gertrude. Digital image of an undated photo ©️Edward R. Olsen |
52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is a series of weekly prompts to get you to think about an ancestor and share something about them. The weekly prompt is provided by www.amyjohnsoncrow.com. The prompt for the week of March 9 is "Turning Point."
A turning point is a specific moment or event at which a decisive change in a situation occurs—the "hinge" upon which the rest of a story swings. It is the point after which nothing can ever go back to the way it was before.
