Duck Commander Phil Robertson Talks About Why This Country Needs More Jesus

What all is included in Genealogy?

One of the foremost ideas about AncestorEbooks.com is writing about your ancestors and sharing them with your decedents. As you know the Ebooks are created by uploading a Gedcom file (Family Tree File) that you have created on Ancestry.com. That is just the beginning.

After you have created your Ebook with up to 2400 pages, a page per ancestor, you have those pages to fill! Suddenly Names, Dates and Places just aren't enough! So, how do you fill those pages if you really don't know much about your ancestor? Ancestry.com can help you with that!

It's called Creating Chronologies (or Timelines), and according to Ancestry.com it allows us to "view our ancestor's life in context." You already have the 'bones' for your ancestor, ie. names dates and places; now you just flesh out the faces, muscles and add a wardrobe.

There are 3 important pieces you should add to flesh out your heritage:

1. Stories and Photos
2. Documents, Certificates of Birth, Marriage, Death. Newspaper articles if you have any.
3. Old letters, bills, etc.

For an example I am going to use our Grandmother Dorothy Mattie Hughes, born in the year 1897 in Nebraska. What can we learn about her life as a child? She was born in Gage County, NE, but the family moved to Custer, Kansas soon after; we can tell this because there is a 1900 US Federal Census that states she was 2 years old. Which meant she was probably dressed wearing a pinafore over her dress. Much like this dress and pinafore from magdalenaperks.wordpress.com...

Although Dorothy wasn't Amish, her family was very poor, and this would have been a simple dress her mother or Aunt Alice could have made for her.

Kansas State Board of Agriculture conducted a Census every 5 years from 1855-1930, & in 1905 Dorothy's family were living in Limestone, Kansas. She was the oldest with 3 little brothers, ages 5, 3 & 1.

By 1910, her family was living in Valley, Smith, Kansas, where her father worked as a farm employee. By this time she had 5 siblings.


We don't have any photos of Grandma Dorothy as a girl, however she talked of living in a 1 room Soddy with her Mom, Dad, Aunt Alice, three brothers and two sisters, and about a nearby neighbor who didn't like sleeping alone, so he would ride the mile to their home each evening and throw his blanket roll on the floor by the door.

This picture matches the stories the family told of life in a Soddy, although this one is from irwinator.com. This page also states that there were approx. a million Soddies in use in Canada and the United States during this time.


Here, if you wish you could tell of how a Soddy was made and why they were so often used. How a well made Soddy had a deeply slanted roof with live grass to shed the rain, and a muslin ceiling to keep dirt and centipedes from falling in the soup.

As a girl, Dorothy was part of the Nebraska Land Run, Her family lived near the Gulf of Texas where ranchers would poison wells to get nesters off the land they thought of as their own.

When Dorothy was 16 years old she met and fell head over heals for George Schnee, Stepson of Thomas Gasvery who married his mother, Ida, after the disappearance of his father about 1905 in Pennsylvania. When George was 17 he worked at the local hardware store in Atchison, Kansas. Atchison is 230 miles East of Valley Township, Kansas and I haven't discovered what brought him into that area.

Dorothy's folks wouldn't allow her to marry until she was 18, which she was in 1916. That year she married her sweetheart in Blocker, Oklahoma.

See how much more interesting this is than:

Dorothy Mattie Hughes: Born ____
Married George Schnee ____
Died ____

 This is just a rough draft, it would be even more interesting if I put in comments from people who knew them, Certificates of Marriage, Death, Births, their lives as ShareCroppers in Oregon, etc. When you bring your gedcom file to AncestorEbooks.com, bring along the stories, history of the areas they lived in, the poetry or paintings, etc. Bring your life to your family history!

Heroines (not the drug) Female Heroes

It amazes me how many women, known for their bravery, determination and grit, who were unknown to me! Can you imagine the impact on the lives of girls if they had known about women such as the Nightwitches, pilots who fought the Germans in WWI in planes what barely flew... who had to go out on their wings to restart the props of their planes in order to fly home; Female WWII Pilots (Fly Girls)... 

Why didn't we learn about Georgia O’Keeffe,  the Mother of American Modernism, who painted flowers in New York as if they were seen through a magnifying glass. She once said "I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do"

OR: Allyson Felix, American track & Field sprint athlete; Anuradha Koirala, founder of Maiti Nepal-a non-profit organization in Nepal that is dedicated to helping the victims of sex trafficking; or have heroines held up as examples of womanhood such as Irena Sendler, who worked in the Warsaw Ghetto (Poland) & smuggled 2500 Jewish infants in the bottom of her tool box & larger children in a burlap sack in the back of her truck to save them from the Nazis; Corrie ten Boom whose book The Hiding Place provided graphic examples of life in the Nazi prison camps and the many times God answered their prayers... Yes we watched the movie and we have read the book, but why do we not instruct our girls in having the courage to be their best instead of accepting whatever comes their way?

Audrey Hepburn was one of my favorite actresses, but I never really knew her. Ms Hepburn, who through UNICEF programs increased public awareness of the challenges facing the world's children (ahepburn.com) She spoke before the American Congress on Hunger in '89, and 91, seeking aid for Africa. She is an amazing woman our young women need to know about in order to emulate!

The blog, EVE (Equal Visibilty Everywhere) has created an alphabetical list of 100 Great American Women you can find here. I hope you will help your young women choose a woman to emulate, whether the woman comes from our history or the Bible, sometimes I believe I could have become something better if I had been able to imagine it.

We have Daniel Boone, Benjamin Franklin, Davy Crockett, Abraham Lincoln, George Patton, Louis Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Joe Montana, Audie Murphy, but why do we know so little about Lady Deborah Moody, a respected community leader who brought settlers seeking religious freedom to Gravesend (which became New York); Ann Bradstreet, a poet in the mid 1600s; Molly Pitcher, who hauled water to Continental soldiers at the Battle of Monmouth; Sarah Josepha Hale, Editor of Godey's Lady's Book, which promoted the betterment of women; Harriet Beecher Stowe, writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was based on her own experiences; Harriet Tubman, who was a Conductor on the Underground Railroad, where she let 300 slaves to freedom and served the Union forces in South Carolina; Clara Barton, Started the American Red Cross; Florence Bascom, the first woman and female geologist to earn a PH.D from Johns Hopkins, who pioneered microscopic viewings of minerals & Rocks.... For more on these and many more, go to u-s-history.

Let's help our youth to choose a hero or heroine to follow and help them emulate that hero/heroine through the teachings of service, selflessness and fortitude (going beyond duty to do what is extraordinary). CMB

Will History Repeat Itself?

The stock market crash of October 1929 was the start of the Great Depression. Investors had borrowed too much money and gambled with stocks bought with only 10% down. When the stock prices began to fail there was no money to pay for the other 90% they owed.

People rushed to their banks and took out as much of their savings as they could, which collapsed the banking system. The few businesses that could still afford to pay their employees paid for work days that were 10-12 hrs long with one 30 min lunch & and even those were starvation wages of 45 cents per hour according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Farmers hoped to afford to butcher a pig to add to the rows of garden produce, but more often than not the pig was sold to pay the rent!

These poetic words are from our Great Grandfather Hughes:

A DRY-WOOD Farmer's Blues

I’m just as sore as I can be,

And think I’ll quit the farm by-gee,

For twelve long months, I’ve worked like –well

I haven’t raised a thing to sell.

I’ve plowed amongst these Dry Wood rocks,

And wore out twenty pairs of sox,

And now I’m feedless, sockless too,

And don’t know what the heck I’ll do.

Our hogs wont pay for what they eat,

And cows are selling mighty cheap,

And all our hens that lay at all,

Are those that starved to death last fall.

I haven’t made a bloomin’ cent,

With which to pay my pasture rent,

And taxes are as high by-Joe,

As what they were a year ago.

The butterfat we used to sell,

Kept up our table fairly well,

But now we’re eating ‘margarine’,

Just let ole Bossy keep her cream.

A fellow cant afford to die,

‘the homes are free beyond the sky,

But what it costs to get one there,

Would bust a multi-millionaire.

So whats a fellow goin’ to do?

Just sit around the house and stew,

Or buckle in and do his best,

And take a chance with all the rest.

I guess I’ll take another chance,

While “Hoover’s” wearing out his pants,

The world may howl around my door,

But “Hooverism” makes me sore.

 ---By Dry Wood Dreamer.