Thank you Jeanne Coe! Jeanne, a past president of the Eastern
Washington Genealogical Society handed me a copy at a recent meeting that came
from the website www.alphadictionary.com.
She had printed out the bit about Washington got its name. “On August 29, 1851,
27 male settlers met at Cowlitz Landing (south of present-day Olympia) to
petition Congress for a Columbia Territory separate from Oregon covering the
area between the Columbia River and the 49th parallel. The petition
was reaffirmed by 44 delegates who met in Monticello on November 25, 1852.
Congress approved the new territory on February 10, 1853 but changed its name
to Washington
in honor of the first president of the U.S. It was President Millard Fillmore
who signed the papers creating Washington State on November 11, 1889. Did you know these details?
*****************
Does your genealogical society’s seeming lack of
enthusiasm to participate get you down? Perhaps this will help. This is a blurb
from the September 1975 issue of the EWSG newsletter and was titled: “There’s a
Hitch to It.” (No author given.)
With his thumb up, a hitchhiker says, “You furnish
the gas, car, attend to the repairs and upkeep, supply the insurance and I’ll
ride with you. But if you have an accident, I’ll sue you for damages.”
This sounds pretty one-sided but one wonders how
many hitchhikers there are in many organizations and even churches. Many
members seem to say, “You go to the meetings, serve on boards and committees,
do the paper work, contact the legislators and take care of things that need
doing and I’ll just do along for the ride. And if things don’t suit my fancy,
I will complain, criticize and probably get out and hitchhike to another group.”
Hitchhiker
or driver, which one are you???
**************
Did your ancestors settle in western
states and were first landowners? If so, you can find the information about
their land at www.historygeo.com. Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New
Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming land records were
recently added to the database. I don’t have ancestors in those states but I
did find great-great-grandfather in Kansas. Doing a search on some surnames of
those I know settled in these areas produced a lot of results. Check this
database for your ancestors. Read the article about these 3.3 million original
landowners added to historygeo.com.
Blog.historygeo.com/2015/06/08/western-states-added-to-first-landowners-project/
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(Jeanine Barndt is the Head Librarian
for the Heritage Quest Research Library in beautiful downtown Sumner,
Washington; this bit is from the HQRL Newsletter for Fall 2015.)
We
all know the nursery rhyme, Yankee
Doodle. Did you ever wonder what this part really meant: Stuck a
feather in his hat and called it macaroni. Well I just found out! Reading Edward Rutherfurd’s New York (2010), on page 197, and
the year is 1765: “Some months ago, word
had arrived of a new g roup of dandies in London. Macaronis, they called
themselves. They had taken to parading round London’s West End and their
extravagant plumed hats and jeweled swords had caused quite a scandal……” A character in the book fears that the custom
will seep into New York “by the next boat,” he felt that such a public
extravagance could only be an offense to most people in hard-pressed New York. “Don’t
let any of your family dress up like a Macaroni,” he urged. Now you know.
“Jon”
is a regular patron using the Genealogy Section of the downtown Spokane Public
Library. He is not a member of EWGS nor is he interested in our meetings or
classes. But he is a dedicated researcher. I recently found him studying books
from our set of The Domesday Books (“a
manuscript record of the ‘Great Survey” of much of England and parts of Wales
completed in1086 by King William the Conqueror; it contains the records of
13,418 settlements in the English countryside). And my point is this: A genealogy library serves all wonderful
sorts of patrons and we librarians must never think that “Oh, nobody uses THOSE
books so let’s put them into storage,” or worse yet, donates them to the next
book sale. Do you have a set of The
Domesday Books in your collection? Do your library patrons use those books?
If not, the probable reason why is that they don’t know about them and how to
benefit from studying them. Spokane Jon could teach them!
Judy Russell, The
Legal Genealogist, was one of the speakers at the recent NWGC (Northwest
Genealogical Conference). As you would guess, and knowing she is/was a lawyer,
she speaks on exacting and precise topics. Her blog post of 14 August 2015 was
a tribute to the many and good records in our Evergreen State.
“Eighteenth in size among the states, 13th
in population, known for its timber and aircraft industry, home of the
Kennewick Man and the Space Needle, Washington State is also home to some truly
amazing genealogical resources.”
Then Judy took an entire page worth to list and
describe some of our resources, and ended with “This is truly a comprehensive
and amazing resource for anyone with Washington State research to be done. So
check it out….. the Evergreen State has a lot to offer.”
We
thank you, Judy, for your sure and kind words about our Pacific Northwest home.
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