One Thing Leads to Another

After talking with a friend earlier this week (you know who you are), who mentioned my lack of recent blogging … then sitting through my hubby’s presentation on FamilySearch.org at our Lodge on Thursday, I decided I wanted to get back to working on my family lines.

Actually, these two things coincided with another BIG issue being discussed lately and that is how do we preserve our stuff now and into the future? The discussions talk about different hard drives, thumb drives, cloud options, Ancestry trees, FamilySearch trees, and any other website that will host information on our ancestors.

At this point I am convinced that the only way I want to preserve my family information is through monographs. I have written two so far (Hardenbrook family and Nunn family) and disseminated them to local libraries and historical societies. As I think about this issue and review my family lines, I realize I have a fair amount of work ahead of me. So, back to this week and my decision to pull out those family folders.

I have been working on my second Caitlyn Jamison mystery, but writing time was hit and miss. If I am going to finish another book, I had to set a certain period of time to write. I started that and it’s working. So now I'm going to set a similar time aside to work on genealogy. As soon as I got back into it yesterday, I realized how much I missed my ancestors.

I had been working on the Tucker line, and from my 1 January 2016 post I finally found the death date and circumstances surrounding the death of Amos Tucker. I was curious about his wife, and so that is what I focused on yesterday. Amos married Martha VanGosbeck (sometimes spelled VanGasbeck) of Hector, Schuyler County, New York. Martha’s parents were Abram (b: 1809) and Matilda (b: 1813) VanGosbeck. Martha had two sisters, Mary (b: 1838) and Sarah (b: 1847). Sarah married someone with the name of King, and the sad piece of information I came upon was that Sarah died in 1875 at the age of 28; Martha died 1877 at the age of 28.

In the 1855 New York Census, Abram states he as a “hotel keeper.” I wondered about this, and so to FultonHistory.org I went. There I found a number of ads in the Ovid Bee for the Union House in Trumansburg, New York that had Abr VanGosbeck, proprietor.

Abram died in 1861; Matilda died in 1871, Sarah in 1875, which left Martha living alone in Newfield, New York at the time of the 1875 New York census. I have yet to locate Mary VanGosbeck.

P.S. I still have not figured out the best way for me to secure my working files should something happen to the house. Maybe temporary cloud storage would be the answer.