Monday Memories

The Pink Easter Dress (circa. 1963)

When I was a little girl, there weren't a lot of place to go shopping, as far a clothes goes. There was Rich's, which is now Macy's, and then we had a new mall... they built a new mall - it was Columbia mall and they had a Sears there. So... and Sears had also what was called a Davidson's - I mean the Columbia Mall had a Davidson's too. But, Sears is where my mom took me shoppin for my Easter dress.

So, this particular year, the one that she found she really liked. And it was on sale and it was a good price and everything. And I thought it was really pretty too. And it was a pink dress and it had layers to it, so it had the.... the different layers. And it had this pretty little white jacket that went with it and it just looked adorable. But they didn't have it in my size. And mom and the sales rep... lady looked all over tryin' to find one in our size, but they just didn't have one. And then, all the sudden, Momma asked her about the one on the mannequin - what size that was. And the mannequin was up on top of the rack, so it wasn't like they could get to it real easy, but she found out it was a size 10, which is the size that they needed for me. So they undressed the mannequin and I got to try it on and it fit perfect. And it just looked... I just looked... Momma thought I just looked so pretty in it and it was just perfect for me. So she got the dress, and so she... of course we take it home and put it up and everything.

So then, unfortunately, I had a growing spurt and I kept growing. And I was just growing and growing and growing. Momma got upset with me on day and she said, "You're gonna have to stop growing you're gonna outgrow your easter dress."

So, sure enough come Easter, I didn't actually outgrow, but it was a little sho... a little shorter than what normally I was allowed to wear, during that time period. But we've got a picture of me in the pink dress, but I'm not wearing the jacket. So, I don't know if maybe I outgrew the jacket part, or if I just got somethin' spilt on it or if it was just really hot and I just wasn't wearin' my jacket whenever the picture was taken.

But that was always a big thing for us, was to have a new outfit to wear for easter.

Memorial Day

In honor of memorial day, I remember my 4x great grandfather, Wiley Powell.

Private Powell enlisted July 29, 1862 as a private in the Confederate Army. A year and a half later, on January 24, 1864, he died in the hospital at Lynchburg, VA of “Phthisis Pulmonalis” or, Consumption of the lungs. He was buried at The Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg. He left behind a wife and ten children, the youngest less than a year old when he went to war.

my take on the whole LDS/Catholic Records thing

So, a few weeks ago there was a big announcement by the Catholic Church, in which they stated that they would not make their records available to the LDS Church. This is due to the LDS tradition of baptizing the dead. I have to assume that some sort of talks took place but no resolution could be settled for the Catholic church to make such an extreme decision. 

Looking at forum posts and other feedback about this online, I'm very surprised about the downright selfishness of genealogists. Almost every comment I've seen attacks the Catholic Church's decision and calls them selfish. I just don't get it. This is about LDS church members refusing to respect another religion's practices & traditions. Because they continued to baptize Catholics after death, the Catholic Church did what it felt they needed to do to protect their church members. These records belong to the Catholic Church and they have the right to do with them what they will.

Volunteering

These past few days I've been volunteering, and reaping the benefits of other volunteers. 

I've had great success using the website, Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness. I submitted a few requests and that very day received a response. A very helpful individual obtained cemetery photos for me from Rock Branch Baptist Church in Elbert County, Georgia.

I decided to return the favor, however indirectly, but signing up to volunteer myself. With a microfilm copy of the Atlanta (Journal) Constitution only minutes away, I thought I would volunteer to do lookups for obits.

I also saw an article in About.com's Genealogy Blog. The blogger talked about a volunteer project from FamilySearch.org and their FamilySearch Labs in which they sign up volunteers to index documents. So far I've indexed three pages of the 1870 Mass. Census and a page of Philadelphia 1885-1951 Marriage Indexes. It's actually very easy with the software you download from them. It takes less than 30 minutes to do each page (which is downloaded at random) and will be provided to genealogists for free.