Riverbend Journal

  I'm not sure when I first saw the movie Footloose, but it made an impression on me. Especially the "chicken" scene on the tractors where as farm kids riding to school on the bus, we debated the outcome endlessly. Those of us with farms using John Deere tractors were happy with the outcome while those kids from International using farms vowed their tractor would have one had they made it to head on head, or scoop on scoop as it might be. Sometimes when my parents were gone on a weekend, we ended up at a local babysitter across town who would keep us over the weekend. One Sunday after we attended her church, she picked up her grandson, my age, and we drove to the county seat and to a corner pizza shop called "Diamonds" where they cut their pizza into diamond shaped slices. In the corner was a jukebox and on this particular Sunday, the babysitter's grandson said he had a quarter to put into the machine and we were excused to go make a selection. Only when we ...

  In researching more on my 4th great grandfather Christian Echard and newly discovered wife Sarah Patterson Echard, I came across a court case that dates back to 1850. Evidently Christian died without a will which when he was on his second spouse at the time of his death, both with kids, left some confusion as to who gets what. The file is composed of 98 pages of script, most of it much more illegible than the sample shown above, and written in lawyer-ese which makes it very difficult for my reptilian brain to understand. I know it related to my line because I can clearly make out my 3rd great grandmother mentioned by name, Sarah Jane Echard Ware throughout the documents but not really the finer details of what happened. Included among the script filled pages were two newspaper clippings dating back to the 1850's about the sale of Christian's property and a letter written by Sarah to her uncle Peter about the money she received as part of her inheritance.  I have tried transc...

  As you can see by the object plugged into the upper right bay of my computer, I received my HHD drive with spinning disks inside but that is my second one. The first one arrived and after figuring out that hard drives now are mounted with "sleds" (that lighter blue colored object) and not using physical screws like in the old days. It is actually kind of ingenious as I have fussed with small screws that got dropped during installation and were nearly impossible to find. The sleds require only fingers and slide in, out and snap into place. I turned on the computer and saw nothing that said I had installed a hard drive. A day later, maybe three hours of troubleshooting and another hour on the phone, I finally figured out that my computer actually limits the size of a hard drive to 2TB (terabytes). All my data is just shy of 1/2 TB so really, having that limitation is not a hard ship. But while shopping for the hard drive online, many drives start at 2 TB in size these days an...

  A.I. Generated Artwork I woke up to the sound of what sounded like a garbage truck rumbling down the road and realized that I had forgotten to take out the garbage the night before. Nothing gets the body more alert in a faster manner. I jumped out of bed, threw on the sweats and raced outside to drag my half empty can out to the curb in a pouring rain, the first I've seen in three or four months. Fortunately, there was no garbage truck in sight and my neighbor's trash can across the street was still unemptied which means the truck hasn't come yet. Normally it comes in mid to late morning, well after I am up and about. But on the days I forget to set mine out, it inevitably comes at 4:30 in the morning... without fail. Now that I have mine out, it probably won't come to nearly noon. Garbage in my neck of the woods, and I suspect elsewhere, is becoming a problem. I'm not much of a consumer so we typically don't have much garbage. I set it out weekly though becau...

  Sarah Jane Echard One of my 3rd great grandmothers is named Sarah Jane Echard. She comes Virginia though she married into the Ware family which I've traced back through southern Indiana to Kentucky. Perhaps 20 years ago when I last researched her origins, I was convinced at the time that her parents were Christian Echard and Lydia Treavy Echard. But as I have started the process of compiling my research notes for my 4th great grandparents, all 64 of them, I realized that perhaps I have at least one of the parents wrong.  Sarah was born in 1837 according to her tombstone. Recently when I went to the historical center in the county south of me, which I wrote about Here on January 1st, I found an obituary for her. I will post it below but essentially, is says her parents were Christian and Sarah Echard, not Lydia as I had written in 20 years ago. So I started digging a bit into records for my 4th great grandfather Christian Echard and sure enough discovered a marriage record b...