New Discoveries Forthcoming

On Friday, I won National Novel Writing Month with a little over 50,000 words written in "The Six-Gun Conjurer."  After 25 days of solid writing, it was time I took a little break.  I still have a few scenes to write, and the big finale to complete, and I'll get to that in a few days, but it's sometimes good to sit back and take a breather.  Creativity takes time.

Anyway, yesterday morning I finally got around to activating my subscription to Ancestry.com.  A few months ago, I purchased a copy of their Family Tree Maker 2011 software, and it came with 3 free months of full access to their site.  There are a lot of things they have in their database that you can't find elsewhere, and it is helping me to uncover more bits of information about my various family lines.

Here are just a few highlights of what I've uncovered so far.

New information has already cropped up concerning my Robinson line.  It turns out that William V. Robinson was a Civil War Veteran.  He signed up as a Private with the New Jersey 6^th Infantry Regiment, and ended up as a Sergeant with the 8^th.  I also found his death record, stating he died on 28 July 1910.

Joseph B. Robinson, as it turns out, was a house painter in Camden, New Jersey, until his untimely death on 18 March 1918.  He died of Tuberculosis.  I'd been unaware of this information, as Joseph ran off on his wife and daughter about 20 years earlier.  Joseph's older sister, Mary J. Robinson, also died of TB on 10 December 1904.



John Julius Kirton



I found WWI army enlistment cards for two of my grandmother's uncles, Hugh Wiley Counts and Milton Counts.  I'm sure there are some interesting stories to be had there, though I haven't had the chance to hear too much from my Counts cousins recently.

In addition to these discoveries, I am finding more data that substantiates my earlier findings.  I've also found a few photographs of interest, including my father's parents' yearbook photos from the University of Michigan, and a picture of my mother's father with the Glee Club from his freshman year at East Orange High School in 1933.

There is much more to uncover, so I'll get back to it.  I expect to resume work on my writing projects in a few days, after I've dug up enough family data to satisfy my curiosity and compose a few more posts.