Although I have found genetic genealogy to be interesting and enriching I use a much different approach with the use of DNA testing than with standard and traditional genealogy, using paper and digital image documentation. Genetic genealogy, using the science and technology behind DNA collection and analysis, looks at deep ancestry over tens of thousands, sometimes millions or billions of years, while standard and traditional genealogy looks at ancestry over generations of people, over hundreds of years, sometimes several hundred years, and even, in some rare cases, sometimes thousands of years. Continue reading
Author Archives: JPR Ancestry
Military Historian Profile: Jonathan Gawne, Militaria Magazine, Author, Collector
Finding Your Father’s War : A Practical Guide to Researching and Understanding Service in the World War II US Army, by Jonathan Gawne (Casement: 2006)
Military Historian, Collector, and Author Jonathan Gawne has written books and an extensive amount of articles and has consulted on many, many projects on the subject of World War II. This book, “Finding Your Father’s War : A Practical Guide to Researching and Understanding Service in the World War II Us Army” (Casemate: 2006), promises to be an excellent resource for family history researchers, military historians, or history enthusiasts who have an interest in learning more about an individual’s military history.
Understand that Gawne is much more than a military collector and enthusiast, as illustrated by a brilliant interview on military-trader.com by Andrew L. Turner. He is a scholar who has done his research thoroughly and has clearly gone beyond the level of the war movie fan-turned-re-enactor, doing extensive reading, studying still and moving images, interviewing veterans, and talking with other historians and collectors. Check out his work on the “Ghost Army of the E.T.O.” project. He’s written his own book on that subject, “Ghosts of the ETO…”. He has a website promoting “Finding Your Father’s War” and an archive saluting the 8th Division. Gawne has also written “Spearheading D-Day : American Special Units in Normandy”.
If interested in contacting Jonathan Gawne through social media you might try his Facebook page. Also, check out his works on the Militaria Magazine website.
Back At It
Me, “Jay” Jonathan Parrish Rivers, at my desk
Me (“Jay” Jonathan Parrish Rivers) and my dad, “Jim” James Calvin Rivers, Christmas 2017
My cousin, “Katie” Kathryn Ann Schemering, with our grandparents, Reba Virginia SEAL Rivers and Thomas Dewitt Rivers, Jr, about 1991 or 1992
The Michael & Carey Rivers Family with Uncle John Rivers, James Island, South Carolina, on the spot where Riversville once stood, later renamed Secessionville, Fall 2017
Uncle John Rivers, James Island, South Carolina, on the spot where Riversville once stood, later renamed Secessionville, Fall 2017
My genealogy work area in my home in Columbus, Ohio
My AncestryDNA kit arrived on Thursday, 1 February 2018
The Blitch Family book cover
Headstone marking burial of my Great Great Grandmother, “Lora” Lorena Amanda O’NEAL Rivers, Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina
Sign for Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina
Aerial View of Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, SC
Tombstones at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, SC
I am back on the saddle again, hit with the genealogy bug, ever since I got my computer and internet hooked up in my new home, with space to store all of my research materials and reference books.
I’ve been going over the Joseph D. Rivers Pedigree Charts. I’ve been going through the screen clips of those charts that I’ve clipped into Evernote, and I’ve been placing where I left off two years ago.
I’ve restored my Ancestry account and have purchased a new Ancestry DNA kit.
I’ve made a collection of ‘ancestor cards’ that will be a short glimpse of a particularly interesting ancestor. I’ve been working on my virtual cemeteries on Find A Grave.
Stay tuned for more posts!
Why I Celebrate Samuel L. Jackson Day on 21 Dec Every Year…
Facebook Post from 21 Dec 2012
This note about a happy day popped up in my ‘this day in history’ type feed from Facebook, and I remember this day vividly. It was a great wintery day!
My girlfriend and I celebrate actor Samuel L. Jackson‘s birthday on this day, rather than the day my mom died nine years ago, but it’s hard to forget sad days.
I’d rather remember the happier days, but I realize that in remembering the bad times I create a palette of moments that makes all of those moments important in expressing how truly valuable is life.
Happy moments stand out, however brief they may be.
This is one reason why I love history so much! By studying what happened in the past I can see how all of these moments are connected — how they touch each other and ultimately lead us to the present moment. Right now.
Mom, I love you for being me my mom, and particularly for all of the happy moments you gave to me.
Happy Birthday, Samuel L. Jackson!
Happy December 21!
Many ancestors, many siblings, many descendants, many cousins
It is hard to imagine sometimes how many ancestors we have when we go pretty far back in generations.
When you start counting these things it’s easy, at least for me, to be amazed.
Everyone has two biological parents, no matter how complicated the fertilization process is, because, let’s face it, things have changed. There are all kinds of technologies and procedures that complicate matters, but just for the sake of this lesson: We each have two (biological) parents, and every one of our ancestors has two parents.
The Joseph D. Rivers Pedigree Chart Preservation and Continuity Project – Update, September 2016
Norfolk & Western RW Safety Awards
Map of James Island, SC, from JD Rivers Chart, Sheet 4
Tree of Life
Florida & Southern RW Train
Princeton, WV
Princeton, WV
Abandoned Lake Shawnee Amusement Park
Riversville Historical Marker
Lake Shawnee, Princeton, WV Postcard
There are five “sheets”, which are really five different charts, that make up the Joe Rivers Ped. Chart collection. I found them when a fellow family historian pointed me to the Thomas W. Rivers Collection that is available online through East Carolina University. That collection contains all five of the charts that are known to exist that Joe Rivers compiled, using data compiled by a whole slew of family historians who have researched the Rivers family, and other connected families, over decades and decades. These are people like Leon Madison Rivers, just one of thousands upon thousands of our cousins who took his interest in looking into and sharing our family’s history to a whole new level and made it available to future family historians to use and build on. It has been my passion to just be able to take part in a story that has been unfolding and has been told and re-told for a long, long time. I hope that when I’m long gone that future family historians can use the work that we’ve all put into understanding, recording, and sharing this great story of ours.
What I’ve done so far…
with Sheet 4 of the Joe Rivers Pedigree Chart, which is the copy of the huge “family tree” chart that was recovered from Grandma Reba’s and Grandpa Thomas’s home in 2009 (thank you, Vera Rivers Schemering!), or maybe 2010, is to capture small “screen clips” of a digital copy (thank you Deborah Jane Rivers Clasby!) of the chart and to save them to Evernote, a “note-taking” app.
I took the whole sheet and “clipped” an image of every family group on the chart, and now I am entering the data from the chart, as best as I can, since some of it is difficult to read, even when the print is blown up to 200-300%.
Over the years, in my moments of lunacy, I’ve saved many of those screen clips as image files onto my PC’s hard drive so that I can add them to the RootsMagic database, and I have used Evernote to “tag” them and organize them into families and sort out the families, places, and individuals associated with each image. I use these “notes” when I enter the data into RootsMagic, and I use other online sources, like big-name genealogy sites (Ancestry.com, GENI, WikiTree, Genealogy.com, FamilySearch), newspaper archives (newspapers.com), document archives (university libraries), to find primary and/or secondary and tertiary (etc) sources to support the claims made in the charts.
When Joe Rivers compiled all the data he could amass in preparing these five beautiful charts he was using data that came from real research. He used documentation. He checked on sources. He recorded where he found those sources and where they could be found again. He may have even possessed some primary documents, like Family Bibles, family papers, family heirlooms, photographs, hand-drawn charts, or any vast number of ‘documents’ (using that term loosely). At this point I am unaware of the location of these ‘documents’ that Joe Rivers was using. He makes references in his charts to certain ‘documents’, such as a family heirloom that was a vase, emblazoned with the initials “G.R.” that indicate, supposedly, that the vase once belonged to George Rivers, Sr, a Rivers Family patriarch (my seventh great grandfather).
These source ‘documents’ that Joe Rivers used in his project had to have gone somewhere or stayed somewhere. Maybe some of them ended up in the Library of Congress, an archives somewhere, a library, or a museum? Maybe they are in the possession of a Rivers descendant? Maybe some of them were ‘lost’ or destroyed? Maybe some of them ended up on EBay? I don’t know. What I do know is that these objects, these family heirlooms, these source ‘documents’ should be preserved and archived and documented and be made available to be used for research and for viewing. Maybe someday they will be?
In the meantime, I am using the charts as a guide, and I am using the resources available to me, to document the information made on the charts, to fill in the data ‘gaps’, to get through the ‘brick walls’, and to add information that was not included on the charts. A lot has happened since the final chart was published in 1970!
Although I feel like a total snoopy-snoop for doing so, due to time constraints and money constraints, I’ve had to use Facebook and Find-A-Grave and Twitter and Ancestry and GENI and Flickr and Instagram and all kinds of websites and social media in order to gather some of my the information needed for this project. I’ve made it a point to ask people if they would like to provide information for this project and have done some ‘interviews’ here and there, using email and social media. I’ve also used information that was made publicly available. It is not my goal to publish personal information about my living or recently-deceased relatives and ancestors and to make people vulnerable in terms of personal security or to violate their desires for privacy. So, I follow a system for protecting the privacy and security of people in this family project. Please let me know if you spot something that I may have missed or overlooked.
I am working on this project on an almost daily basis now and I will make an effort to keep you all posted through my blog and through this group.
I can’t explain why I’m so crazy about doing genealogy and learning more and more about history and our family’s history other than to say that I know I was born to do it, and I promise to put everything and all that I am into this project. Thank you all for showing interest in this project and for all your help and cooperation and support!
Who Are The Parents of Ollie Virginia “Ollie” Richards, My Great Grandmother? – Part 1
Yesterday, I received a message from a cousin of mine who I had been waiting to hear back from for such a long time I had almost forgotten about what she had to say. Brenda Pinti reached out to me in the end of January 2013 to tell me that she knew my maternal grandmother, my mother, as well as my great grandmother, the mother of my maternal grandmother. I replied back to her message, indicating my eagerness to learn anything she could pass on to me about our family, but I didn’t hear back from her right away. In fact, two-and-a-half years went by before I finally heard back from her.
I was very excited when I read this message from Brenda, as I was very close with my maternal grandmother. Grandma Lois Marjorie PALSON Romanac, who I called “Grannymom” when I was very little,
The author and his grandmother, Lois Romanac, Fall 1986
was such a gentle and loving person with a kind of prankish sense of humor. It wasn’t an ill-intentioned prankishness or malevolence. She just got a kick out of hiding things from my mother, like her cigarettes or her lighter, and giving no clue that she knew exactly where they were. She loved to keep secrets.
She loved to let me know that she knew a secret that she wasn’t going to tell me.
Finding the Right Genealogical Software and “How To” Books and Videos For You, Part 1
For someone who may be new to doing genealogical research and doesn’t yet have a firmly-established system of methods, like myself, you may find it helpful to use a book or a piece of software or videos to help guide you, and provide tips and advice on how to go about searching for your ancestors, especially if you don’t have a lot of time or financial resources to work with.
I’ve looked at a number of different genealogy books and resources over the years… Continue reading
“Life can only …
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
– Soren Kierkegaard
Does it sound trite, opening up with these words on a blog, dedicated to telling the story of my own personal search for my roots? Maybe a little. You can’t deny it, though. Life just doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense when you’re right in the middle of it… Continue reading
…Rivers always reach the sea
“Then as it was,
Then again it will be.
Though the course may change sometimes,
Rivers always reach the sea.Like stars of fortune,
Each has separate rays.
On the wings of maybe,
Down in birds of prey.
Kind of makes me feel sometimes,
I didn’t have to grow.
But as the eagle leaves the nest,
He got so far to go.”(Lyrics from the song, “Ten Years Gone”, by English rock band Led Zeppelin, from their 1975 album Physical Graffiti)