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Saturday, February 15, 2014

RAINSOME . . . PUZZLING SOME

This was a week that "flew by". We did not venture outside except to make a few shopping runs as needed. The weather was "okay" but for me was perfect for working on family research. I spent a ton of time on different websites -- mostly Ancestry.com and GenealogyBank.com. And my travels took me to the "way out" branches of the HILES side and to the "Find-A-Grave" site.

On Tuesday I boiled a whole chicken, and we enjoyed a dinner that night of our favorite chicken pieces along with vegetables and twice-baked potatoes (skins for me). On Wednesday I used the remaining chicken along with the retained stock and made a chicken vegetable soup which we enjoyed that night AND the following two nights as well -- it was THAT good:


The soup was hearty and "slickery" from the pearl barley and everything just tasted so good. Topping that off Gail made some biscuits that were a perfect fit for the soup. We watched the Olympics while dining.

The bad thing is that I may or may not be able to duplicate this soup as I just add things that are on hand and in this case the combination just worked. We started with a huge pot and we have a couple of bowls left that we have frozen for when we need "something tasty".

Dates from our Tree Coming Up

February is a "busy month" for birthdays and anniversaries. Next week what would have been my Mother's 102nd birthday falls on February 20th. And what would have been Gail's parents 75th Wedding Anniversary falls on the 18th of February:


And of course this was a special week because of Valentine's Day yesterday. We enjoyed the day and celebrated with the exchange of tasteful cards and thoughtful gifts.


The Status of the "Search" 

As I have mentioned many times, I never quite know where my day and week will take me on the limbs of the family tree. Somehow, I wound up looking at some records for my cousin Ida Mae Hiles that appeared as I was poking around the databases.

Ida Mae is a cousin (3 generations earlier than me), and I last posted information about her three years ago on January 15, 2011. I had talked about Ida because she was the reason that I was finding "Loterbaugh" relatives in our tree . . . (you can always search my blog by using the search bar above . . .)

I was examining the Find-A-Grave site for Ida Mae (May) Hiles Loterbaugh and I happened to look at the name of the person who created the information for Ida:


Above you can see that it was a Vicky Claypool who put the information out and who mentioned that Ida was her Grandmother -- whom she never met -- that made me curious and I searched our tree for Vicky and came up empty.

I started doing some sleuthing and eventually realized that Vicky's birth name was actually "Loterbaugh". But who were her parents and what were the other details of obviously someone who is related to our line.

I spent a couple of days going through old newspapers searching for "Loterbaugh" and was not disappointed, there is a plethora of newspaper articles about the Loterbaugh families in Ohio.

And eventually I solved the mystery of "Vicky Loterbaugh Claypool" as witnessed in the following article regarding her marriage to Larry Claypool back in 1967:



From the above and other articles I could add Vicky and several others as cousins -- and almost feel as though I know them. I do have an opinion though of the quality of newspaper photos -- for most of us we do not get the opportunity to "see" ourselves in print but for a few times maybe in our lives. What a shame then that the darkened (and sometimes almost silhouette) photos are published.

I have some experience in providing photos to our local newspaper here in town when before the digital age most photos were processed at the lab and then given for publication. We took great care to make sure photos were color corrected and clear as possible only to see later total unrecognizable images in print.

After retiring I had taken a part time job in the last photo lab around here and found it to be a ton of fun and very enlightening. It just was sad to see some of the printed photos that bore no likeness to the original image.

Anyway -- something -- is better than nothing and the above photo does allow some good qualities and maybe even those that know Vicky may say that it is a "good" likeness. I do have to say that it is nice that the caption shows both the married name AND the maiden name which is not always the case.

Following are two charts showing my relationship to both Vicky and to Larry -- surprisingly I was related to both before they were married:


If you click on the above you can follow down the path to see the relationships for both individually to me.

Vicky and the other Loterbaugh family come via Ida who is related through John Hiles Jr and his second wife, Susie Crosby making them "half" cousins. Larry Claypool and family are related via John Hiles Jr and his first wife Charity Reed (as I am) making them full cousins. 

So now you have it -- there are a lot of members of the Loterbaugh family and a lot of members of the Claypool family which are all related to us . . . amazing.

So -- What's on our Nightstand Now?

Well, after what seemed to be "forever" we finally finished the 630+ pages of "Johnny Cash" that may have been a little long. The book was well written, and we learned a lot about the life of Johnny Cash that we had no idea of . . . 

We now have started -- three nights ago -- a book that is quite a bit smaller (and lighter to hold). But so far it has held our interest in a different way in that it is not a biography but is a "teaching" or instructional book so-to-speak.



It is written by Marilu Henner, who has always been a favorite of mine since first seeing her in the TV show. "Taxi". And as it turns out, even though it is not a biography per se there is a lot of biographical information so far just because of the subject matter being about "autobiographical" memory.

Additionally I found it interesting that Marilu grew up in an area of Chicago that I am familiar with as my grandparents (Dayton & Hildred Bumgardner) lived at 2521 N Bernard in Logan Square in Chicago. Logan Square has been mentioned already in the book, and many of Marilu's references are to that area of the city.

Marilu is one of only a handful of recognized people that have a memory condition that gives her the ability to recall EVERY single day of her life -- in full detail. We saw the "60 Minutes" segment by Lesley Stahl that told her story.

We are enjoying the book and are looking to view our memory capabilities differently.

Webinars This Week

We are again enjoying the Legacy Family Tree webinars after their week-off for Rootstech. This week it was another enthusiastic presentation -- this one on -- old Newspapers -- and how to use them to help tell our stories. It is one of the reasons that I spent so much time looking up the "Loterbaugh & Claypool" info.



The second webinar was from Heritage Collector, and it too was "right up our alley" as it presented ways to use GPS in identifying the locations in our photographs. I look forward to the time when a high percent of the photos in my collection identify the locations for future users.

And clicking on the above you can see some of the webinars coming up in the next few weeks.

The Winter Games -- Sochi 2014

We have recorded hours and hours of events and each night we go through as many of the events as possible -- we are having difficulty at times knowing if we have already seen an event or not . . . but one event that I kept waiting to see -- I didn't . . .

We found that we can't watch hours and hours of the same type of events over and over so we look for the more unusual event (to us): 


So we picked "Curling" to watch more of (at the moment) because basically we knew very little about the sport having never participated in it nor even seen it live. We recorded one whole segment that we could never get to "play" because of some technical problem.

Later we did have a couple of hours of curling to watch as the USA beat Germany. It was fascinating to watch and to learn some of the strategies and plays. I think part of the reason that curling is appealing is that it is understandable, and the pace fits our mood right now.

A Success to Report

As I was writing this post, Gail completed one of the most challenging puzzles of her career in puzzle solving. As I have mentioned, she almost boxed up the pieces several times, now she is so glad that she stuck it out.


The bottom right shows the completed puzzle -- finally. This puzzle took over one month to work, and it is a masterpiece. The other pics show the status as she is nearing the finish and can "taste" the victory.

There is only one tiny problem -- she is out of puzzles for the moment -- which is scary because the possibility of her uncovering a real puzzle (like the garage for example) is always a possibility . . .

That was a bit of our week -- tonight it is "Stir-fry Saturday" -- see you all in a few!











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