Monthly Archives: July 2018

Mystery photo #6: Snowplow and songs

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It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, so I figured I’d write an easy post about a mystery photo I keep stumbling across. I’m hoping that someone out there reading this might be able to help me identify it. Maybe you’ll recognize the people, or the machines, the song list on the back, or the handwriting of the song list.

I found the photo in a small pile of papers that my grandmother Dorothy Ruth (McMurry) Black inherited from her aunt, Dorothy “Dot” Mary Bailey. Most of the papers were about Dot’s husband Clarence—his WWI service, his life insurance, his parents, and his recent death. Dot had apparently gathered together papers to help her collect Clarence’s life insurance and widow’s benefits. Clarence died in 1982.

There were, however, three prints from my grandparents’ 1955 trip to Disneyland, and an envelope of what look to be color negatives from a 1950s? family vacation. So from the context in which the photo was found, it appears to be from my father’s side of the family. Continue reading →

Mayflower descendancy, part 6

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It’s been an oddly ambiguous couple of months here in the BlackenedRoots household with  regards to my application to join the Mayflower Society.

As you’ll remember from my last update on this topic, I mailed off my initial stab at documenting my Mayflower line to the State Historian for the California Mayflower Society nine weeks ago. I expected to wait a week or two and hear back from the Historian about parts of my Mayflower line that needed to be better documented. That’s how I figured the Mayflower Society dance went—submit your best effort, be told many parts are weak, resubmit with better documentation for those parts, be told that still a few parts are too weak, resubmit with better documentation for those last few parts, be told that still one part is too weak, resubmit with yet more documentation for that one last line, and finally be told that your pedigree is ready for the scrutiny of the National Office.

Mine didn’t quite go like that. Continue reading →