Daryl Wayne Foster

Daryl Wayne Foster was born 24 Mar 1953 in Saskatchewan, Canada.  Daryl's parents were William Frederick Foster and Marjorie Beatrice Whiteway.

Daryl's father was William Frederick Foster and his mother was Marjorie Beatrice Whiteway.

Daryl married Doneen Lois Hewitt at the City Hall in Vancouver, BC. A woman by the name of Charlotte was present at this marriage. (Charlotte was a good friend of my mother Doneen, and I would love to hear from you Charlotte if you are out there. )

Daryl died 29 Mar 1983 in the Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, BC.

If there is anyone out there who knew Daryl during his life, especially if you have photos or stories to share, I would love to hear from you.  

Tpstry.com

Yesterday and this morning I had the chance to check out Tpstry.

Very interesting idea, simple, but the first site like it I have ever seen.

I would have liked a few features that maybe we will see when the premium version becomes available.

Some features I would have liked to see:

-Custom questions that get asked about everyone, not just the one person.

-Questions involving siblings.

-Custom questions that lead to other questions (ie a custom question flowchart)

-questions involving holidays, first everythings like first job, first xmas that they remember, etc.

-hobby questions

Overall, a great idea with potential!

Tombstone Tuesday - Jennie (Graham) Cornish

Last week I posted the grandchildren of this lady for Wednesday's child.

Altho not related to me in any way that I currently know of ;) this is another photo I have been sitting on since 2002. I have now uploaded it to findagrave.com.

The photo was taken by me in Homer Cemetery, St. Catharines, Ontario.

Matrilineal Monday - Doreen Knox

This is my first Matrilineal Monday post!

Doreen Beryl Knox was born 25 Mar 1932 in Ontario, Canada. She was the daughter of Samuel Knox and Florence Adelaide Phillips.

Growing up, we always called Doreen "Nanny" instead of Gramma or similar names.

She had three sons and one daughter (my mother Doneen Lois Hewitt).

When I was a very young child (about 4 years old) we (my mother, me and my sister Sandra) lived for a short time with Doreen and our grandfather.  I think at that time 2 of my uncles still lived at the house.

When I was a child we would often go to visit Nanny and Nanny would often come to visit my mother. She would drive my mother on errands as my mother never did get her drivers license.

I remember at one time her car was an Oldsmobile, and at another time a Chevette.

Nanny liked to sew, but almost never cooked.

Nanny enjoyed doing ceramics, a hobby she shared with my mother. She was very artistic and whenever we would visit she would give me various art supplies. I think she thought she just had to find the right art medium for me, but I'm hopeless at art!

At Christmas time, she would pay me and my little sister to bake cookies etc. for her so we could make money to buy Christmas gifts ourselves.

She was a smoker of Craven A cigarettes.

She played piano.  All my life my grandparents house had a piano, which I never did learn to play well, but my mother, Doreen and her husband could all play well.

Unfortunately, something happened to cause Nanny to not really associate with her family. The details of what happened have never been made known to me, but the first time I ever met any of her relatives was at her funeral.  Since writing this blog I have heard many stories/theories on what caused the rift with her family.    As they involve people still living, I prefer to keep them to myself at this time.  

Doreen died 26 Dec 1986 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

I miss her and think of her often.

Blacksheep Sunday - Richard Hershell Stewart

For my first Blacksheep Sunday, I have decided to write about one of my husbands relatives - Richard Hershell Stewart.

Richard was my husbands great-granduncle, as my husband is the great grandson of Richard's brother Franklin Hudson Stewart.

Richard was born 28 Apr 1898 in Ontario, Canada.

Richard met a young woman named Lillian Elsie Dunsford, and in time she became pregnant. They had financial issues, so they went to live with Richard's parents, who insisted that they be married given Lillian's pregnancy, and so Richard was married to Lillian Elsie Dunsford in 1923.

Lillian was a young woman from England.

Richard had some issues with finding a job to support his wife and soon to be born child, and the police were even called to the home to try to motivate him.

Richard was obsessed that Lillian was cheating on him, despite assurances from her and his own mother that she was absolutely faithful.

In May of 1923, Lillian gave birth to a baby boy.

On June 12 of 1923, Richard entered the room where Lillian was resting in bed with her baby, and shot her to death, and then attempted to kill himself by shooting himself in the stomach.

He was attended by a doctor and arrested, and convicted of murdering Lillian. His initial sentence was hanging, but this was reduced to life in prison.

His exact date of death and burial is not known.

Surname Saturday - Peverelle, Peverelli

For my first ever Surname Saturday, I have chosen one of my less common surnames - Peverelle or Peverelli.

My great grandmother was Thelma Peverelle. She was born in 1904 in Ontario, Canada. In another post I'll tell the story of how she ended up meeting my great grandfather.

Her father was Lewis Henry Peverelle, and he was born in Birmingham, England in 1865.

Lewis Henry Peverelle's father was Louis/Lewis Peverelle born in 1842 also in Birmingham, England.

It is easy to see how people made the assumption that these Peverelle's were related to the Peverel's around England, such as the ones from Peverel castle.

But the truth is that Lewis Peverelle's father was Lewis Anthony Joseph Napoleon Peverelle who was born under the name Luigi Guiseppe Antonio Napoleone Peverelli in 1804 in Lombardy, Italy.

His parents are so far unknown to me.

I have made contact on Facebook and via message boards with many other Peverelle/Peverelli's but have not been able to connect "my" Lewis born in 1804 to the many other Peverelli's in the same area of Italy.

Truth be told, I haven't yet fully explored this line, as its in Italy, and not as easy as many of my other lines.

Genealogy Television and Black Sheep - Oh My 3/25/2011 - GeneaBloggers | Internet Radio | Blog Talk Radio

About to be watching:

Genealogy Television and Black Sheep - Oh My 3/25/2011 - GeneaBloggers | Internet Radio | Blog Talk Radio

Common Genealogy Mistakes #2

Another common genealogy mistake is not backing up your genealogy often enough, and in the best way!

After attending a great webinar by Thomas MacEntee this week on Backing up Your Genealogy, I was inspired to rethink my data backup plan.

Sure, I have been backing up my genealogy data, including media about weekly. But I was using Legacy's backup, which means all my client work (research reports, notes etc) was not being backed up at the same time. Sure, every once in awhile I have backed up my folders, but with the number of hours a week I work on genealogy even the loss of one week would mean a great deal of loss.

If anyone should have data backup on their mind surely it is me.

A few months ago, my laptop had the misfortune of having chocolate milk spilled on it. The motherboard was fried. It is not really cost effective to replace laptop motherboards as this often costs more than a new (likely better) laptop. Luckily, my brother is a bit of a computer tech geek, so he was able to transfer all my files, including data files off of the laptop hard drive and onto my new desktop computer.

It was a long process tho, and what if he had not been able to do it? What if I had been in Florida as planned when this happened?

I have regularly lost desk top hard drives but have never lost most of my data (usually a few days worth and easily replaceable data such as music and movies were lost).

A couple years ago my mother had a house fire which led to the destruction by smoke and water damage of the majority of the contents of her house.

A few days ago we had a small kitchen fire in my house.

Think of all the times you have narrowly avoided losing all your precious genealogy data, not to mention family digital photos and so on.

I usually have used rather poor methods of backup. I usually have two or more hard drives on the computer so I copy important files once in a while to the other drive. Problem with this of course is that if the entire computer was destroyed in a house fire this would be little use!

I would also sometimes backup to DVD. Problem is I have a great deal of data and it takes about 5 DVDs to store it all. And of course, if there was a house fire, this wold also be of little use, as altho I always *intend* to take copies somewhere else, like my brother or sisters house, I really don't actually do so. And of course saving to 5 DVDS is not the fastest process so I tend to put it off.

Even if I did take the DVDs offsite, how often is this really realistically going to happen? Once a week? Once a month? What happens if the disaster that hits my home also affects the offsite location. Obviously, in order to be able to physically take the DVDs to the offsite location it will be nearby. If a disaster hit that affected the entire city (flood, earthquake etc), my data would be lost.

I have 4 children and one on the way, plus 2 dogs and 2 cats in my household. I love my genealogy, but if there was a house fire, there would be no question of even trying to move the computer out.

I also tend to leave my computer on 24/7. My house could have a house fire that destroyed my computer when I was not even home or while I am asleep.

I had heard good things about Dropbox, and decided to try it. While they do have a 2 GB free plan, I have much more than that to backup, so I decided to go with the $9.99/mth 50 GB plan.

After moving over all the files I felt I had to have backed up, it appears I will only need about 25 GB.

While I signed up for Dropbox with the intention of using it for backup, I was delighted to discover it can do so much more. Thomas MacEntee had mentioned some of the features, but had remained focused on the backup features, as this was what the webinar was on. In his upcoming webinar I am sure I would have learned all about these features, but I didn't entirely understand them when I signed up.

Basically, once I put a file in the Dropbox, I can work on it on any computer, and it updates on ALL the computers and online. So, if I had a laptop, I could work on my genealogy file at home on my desktop, then grab my laptop and head to the library. At the library I could work on the file some more, and when I returned home all the new data would be on my desktop for me to continue there.

I now feel like I am ready to buy a new laptop!

Fearless Females

My voice and my mothers voice were nearly identical.

My one sister as a teenager appears almost identical to photos of my mother taken when she was a teenager.

My one daughter looks almost identical to photos of me at a toddler age.

Wordless Wednesday

another photograph taken by me in 2002, finally released out there to findagrave.com

Wednesday's Child

The photo I chose for Wednesday's child is this one of Nora A Sumbler who died young and her brother Norman K Sumbler.

I took this photo in 2002, and have had it sitting on my various computers ever since. I had every intention of adding it to findagrave.com but never seemed to get around to it. (Just now I finally added this stone to findagrave.com)

The photo was taken at Homer Cemetery in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

A bit of investigating into their short lives shows us that they were twins, both born on 7 Sep 1932. They were the children of William Sumbler and his wife Nellie Cornish.

Wedding Wednesday

Jonas Friar married Anne Haskill 2 Oct 1834 in St. John's Anglican Church in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada. Somewhere around here I have a photocopy of the marriage. This marriage record comes from the Anglican Archives and was sent to me by a cousin years ago.

"Marriage record of Jonas Friar and Anna Haskill
Friar married to Haskill
Jonas Friar of the township of Hope in the District of Newcastle, yeoman, was married by license to Anna Haskill, of the same place, spinster, this second day of October AD 1834 by me .....

witnesses: Isaac Johnson
Eliza Culver"

This is pretty much the first record I have for Jonas, and he disappears by the 1851 census.In the upcoming months Jonas Friar is a "brick wall" I hope to break down!

Doneen Lois Hewitt

My mother was Doneen Lois Hewitt. Here I will try to gather all the photos, stories, documents I can about her.

She was born 15 Sep 1955 in St. Catharines, Ontario.  Her mother was Doreen Knox.

She would have been mtDNA haplogroup U8a1.

She always told that when she was a very young girl she had hearing problems, and had to have tubes put in her ears.  She always said that her parents and other adults thought she was being bad by not listening because she would not hear them (ie hear them request her to turn down the very loud TV etc) but eventually they discovered she simply had hearing problems.

In her early teens she had some behaviour issues and went away to a reform school for girls.

When she was about 14 she was in a few photos, taken I think during her one visit home from the reform school:

Sometime prior to October of 1973 when she became involved with my father for a short while, she moved to Vancouver, BC.  She always claimed I was her first child (this is now in question!)  She would have been 18 when she conceived me, and barely 19 when I was born.  At the time (at least as early as Oct 1973 and at least as late as Nov 1974) she was known as Jan Cordelli.





Sometime around 1976 her mother Doreen visited her in BC.









If anyone comes across this blog who knew my mother, especially when she was a teen or in her 20s I would love to hear from you (yes, even crazy stories!)

Her first husband was Daryl Wayne Foster.  They married at City Hall in Vancouver around 1976.  Apparently I attended the wedding.  (I have no memory of this, as I was about 2).

When I was about 4 we moved from Vancouver back to Ontario.  For a time we lived with Doneen's parents.

One of my memories of my mother is of her playing piano, usually Nights in White Satin.

She was also a decent drawer, altho she rarely drew anything.

For a few years she did ceramics with my grandmother.

She was a horrible cook. We used to always tell her that her pancakes were terrible. One day to try to prove that they weren't really bad she had my uncle Matt come over while we were in school and make the pancakes for lunch.

When my sister and I came home for lunch we took one bite and exclaimed how delicious they were and asked what did she do differently!?

Sometimes when my siblings and I were little, she would tell us a ghost story about a boy named Johnny.  Johnny was supposed to go to the store and buy some liver for dinner, but instead spent the money on candy, and robbed a grave for a human liver at a cemetery on the way home.  From then on he was haunted at night by a ghost say "Joooooohnnnnny....I want my liiiiiiver back".

She often wore Charlie perfume.

Another quirk about her was that she always considered "stupid" to be a bad word.

One cute thing she would do is sign "I love you" in the single hand sign.  Then I would sign it back and we would press the 2 fingers and thumbs together and she would say that means "we love each other".  Other than this sign, I am not aware of her knowing any other sign language.  I have no idea how this tradition was started with her.

She smoked Export A cigarettes.

She wore eye glasses.

She sometimes slept with her eyes open.  She also had a problem with sleep walking.  One time in the middle of the night she woke my sister and myself "for school" while sleep walking.  She told us that when she was young she would sleep walk and once woke up under a tractor or something on the farm them lived on.  She also sometimes talked in her sleep.

She was very afraid of spiders and bees.  For quite some time, the fear kept her almost housebound.  Her mother took her to see a hypnotist at some point, and that helped a great deal but she had the phobias still.

She would get cold sores on her mouth and when this happened, she would rub noses with us, calling it "Eskimo kisses".

She died 30 Sep 2008 in St. Catharines, Ontario.

How I became a genealogist

Many people ask me how I became a genealogist so here is the story:

When I was about 10 or 11 years old a teacher assigned a school project to do our own family tree. I was instantly hooked. I called my grandmother, who pulled out an old family bible which had the names of each generation of women only! going back 4 generations from my great-grandmother, and she told me what family history she knew.

I was fascinated and practiced with a family tree of the royal family, peerage, and so on. Back then PCs were new (Vic20s were all the rage) and the internet was not in public use, so genealogy was done with books and paper, hand-drawn charts, etc.

I viewed reels of microfilm at the local libraries Special Collections, for census and tax lists, newspapers on so on.

Years later when I was able to get internet access at home I began moving all my work onto my computer, and joined mailing lists, and searched the internet for clues, joined Ancestry.com etc. I had never imagined so many genealogists existed!

A bit later I began working as an indexer of census etc documents and awhile later as a professional genealogist taking client work.

For almost two years with Expert Connect on Ancestry.com I worked with clients there.

I do genealogy nearly 365 days a year and I never become bored or tired of it! I am thrilled to make my living doing what I love.

Common Genealogy Mistakes #1

I would like to invite EVERYONE out there to join me in correcting some of the common mistakes many of us make!

I have a white board to the left of my desk, and on it I have a list of things to devote 15 minutes a day to to improve my personal genealogy.

This one is one that I am sure many people are guilty of!

Not recording source citation information on the FRONT of a digitial/photocopied document/photo.

Worse, of course, is no source citation information at all. For the most part I have source information on all my documents but if the digital copies were to be separated from my genealogy program Legacy Family Tree, or someone was to copy only the front side of my paper copies, some future researcher would have no clue what exactly was copied.

This goes for labeling all those photos of your parents/grandparents/kids etc. DO NOT write on the front of the actual photo. There are plenty of websites with instructions on how to safely label the actual photos, but for today I am focusing on digital images.

I have thousands (maybe even tens of thousands!) of digital images, that I know are not correctly labeled!

My birth record - source documents and their informants reliability

As is well explained in Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills, when we examine a document for genealogy evidence, we consider the informant, and how reliable they likely are for the information given in the document.

My own birth registration illustrates how even usually reliable documents can fail us.

The informant for my birth registration was my mother. One would think she would be a reliable source for her own birthplace. Unfortunately, she indicated she was born in Vancouver, BC, Canada when in fact she was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

Her own birth record, which I had to copy and send to correct my birth registration when I was an adult, indicates her birthplace as St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. She always told me she was born in St. Catharines, and my birth record is the only document (that I know of) where she stated she was born in Vancouver.

So my own birth record demonstrates how even ideal informants can give erroneous information. Had I not had my identification stolen, I may never have seen the actual birth registration and corrected it, and some future genealogist would have had quite a hard time finding my mothers birth record in Vancouver, which is very far indeed from her actual place of birth!

My birth record also contained some other quite possibly erroneous information which I will discuss further on the entry for my father.

Myself, the client

As I am sure many of my colleagues can relate to, over the years as my professional genealogy career has blossomed, my personal genealogy time has lessened.

Over the years I have learned new tricks and many new resources have become available.

So I have decided to redo my entire family tree, as if *I* were my own client.

This blog will follow that journey in (re)discovering my ancestors.