Riverbend Journal

 Every now and then when doing genealogy research, I strike gold so to speak. I come across a bit of information that leaves my mind blown away and makes me realizes how much I still have to learn. Sometimes it is good like a picture or the name of an unknown ancestor and sometimes it is details about an ancestor previously unknown to me. This time it falls into the latter category. As you recall, I ended the last post with the above clipping from a newspaper. When I hit the publish button, I thought it was probably then end of my research on Joseph. But over a night's sleep, I decided to dig a little deeper. The above article was one of about a half dozen exact boilerplate versions printed in regional newspapers but not from the one closest to where he lived where many of the other articles I shared came from. It seemed odd that the local one didn't publish one. I hoped it was just the search function didn't capture his name and than manually scanning the newspaper might y...

  It seems fitting that since I began the post on Joseph Chicken/Baker with his gravestone, I would do the same for his father, Joseph Chicken Sr. It is found near a sparsely occupied town in Brule County, South Dakota, on what is now an Indian reservation. On a trip a number of years ago, I found out that I would be going within 10 miles of it and so I couldn't resist stopping to check it out. At the time I knew he was my 4th great grandfather but didn't know a lot about him. I still wouldn't up until a week ago when I wrote the post on his son that you just read last week. I decided to do a new newspaper search based upon my recent successes and turned up a number of articles on the man. However before I post those, I'll tell you what I knew before.  Joseph Chicken Sr. was born in 1811 in Durham County, England according to the 1841 England Census. At the time he was living in the town of Evenwood with his wife Elizabeth Ann Britton and two of his children. My 3rd gre...

  As we typically do every late winter, we helped burn some of the ground on the farm to help establish more healthy plants and ecosystems. The fire kills weeds and invading trees and fosters the growth of soil nourishing prairie grasses. On this particular time, my wife asked to take over my job of running the drip torch to light the fires. I took over her job and drove around in a utility vehicle to mop up any fire that threatened to go where we didn't want it too and to haul people and tools to various points around the farm so that they could minimize that amount of time walking. It was definitely the easier of the two jobs but it was nice to have a change or perspective. Burning is an art and requires one to balance geography, weather conditions and skills such as backfiring. But we've been doing this since I was a teenager and so we do pretty well these days. This day was one day of sun between very windy days full of precipitation. It was probably going to be the only da...

  My search for Joseph Baker actually began quite by accident. I was visiting a cemetery to take pictures of my McKee ancestors (one of which would marry John Henry Baker) and saw this stone about a dozen feet away and took a picture, just because of the last name. At the time, 2nd great grandfather John Henry Baker was as far back as I could trace my Baker family line. It wasn't until over a decade later that I would finally uncover more of this line and piece together some of the story of Joseph Chicken/Baker and come to realize, that the grave above was actually that of my 3rd great grandfather. Joseph Chicken was born in 1847 in the town of Evenwood, County Durham, England to Joseph Chicken Sr. and Elizabeth Ann Britton. Joseph was the fourth child of seven born to this couple who soon immigrated to America in 1849-1850. Joseph Chicken Sr. came first in 1849 with a group of Mormons and the rest came the following year. Joseph Chicken Sr. was listed as a coal miner in England an...

  When our oldest was signed up for a European tour over spring break, my mind turned to logistics, specifically financial logistics. When I was a child in similar circumstances, we were sent on such trips with fistfuls of travelers checks that were nearly impossible to cash, especially when a busload of children all wanted to do the same thing. These days, life is much easier.  Our bank, given enough notice, will allow me to order foreign currency from just about anywhere ahead of time. So we ordered her some Euros. I didn't want m daughter to have a big wad of currency that she had to carry around just in case of pickpockets or perhaps a dishonest person seeing said wad. So we were pretty sparing on the number of Euros we gave her and instead signed her up as an additional holder of our credit card. Between the two, we were hoping she would have to avoid seeking out ATM's that were compatible with her card and were successful. She came back with just a few Euro coins and a h...

Rather than put the "picture" of interest at the top of the post. I am going to do my musings first and let you decide if you want to read the article below.  Based off recent successes in looking for digitized newspapers where there weren't any before, I decided to revisit a deceased ancestor of mine that met an early end and has an interesting story himself. Joseph Baker was actually born Joseph Chicken in 1847 England but after the Civil War, changed his surname to Chicken. I won't go into his details in this post other to say that he died in 1882 at the age of 35 years old. Young even by the standards of the day so I've always assumed it was due to an accident or something more sinister. Years ago when searching, I found an article in 1882 for a Joseph Baker murdered near Chicago but couldn't pin in on my Joseph Baker. More years would go by before more newspapers were scanned and I learned that it was actually a Joseph Becker and not Baker and the article...

I haven't really celebrated St. Patrick's day since I did as a child by wearing green and as a college student by drinking alcohol. As an adult, it has just been another day for the last few decades. But this year, it happens to fall on a Friday of Lent when we Catholics abstain from meat. Not a problem for me. But word came that our Bishop sent out a decree saying that because it was a feast day for a saint, we could eat meat on this St. Patrick's day. I didn't think too much of it at the time but have since read, that only 70% of the bishops in the U.S. are doing so and it definitely isn't a decree issued by the pope. "We" decided to take advantage and my wife slapped a chunk of beef on the counter and told me to corn it. So I dutifully made a corned beef using our crockpot. I have never done so in my life but it came out super tender and delicious. Not really wanting a houseful of cooked cabbage odors to go with it, I opted to use fermented cabbage inst...

  Last fall, my oldest daughter's school announced a trip to Europe over spring break open to honors students who were interested. There were a limited number of openings and we scrambled to sign up for the first come/first serve trip which required a credit card based ATM card only to secure a spot. I had only a credit card and an ATM only card on me, neither of which would work. So we made a made a mad dash back home where I could obtain other means of securing a spot and was successful. There was only two spots left when we successfully signed up. As it turned out, I needn't have worried as the trip never completely filled up. I guess the cost and already planned spring breaks were factors for others. Anyway, the plan was for a ten day tour of Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland, four countries I have never been in. I tried initially to sign up as a chaperone but with the low numbers, especially of young males in need of chaperoning, my services weren't needed. So I ...

Normally looking at a forecast like we were facing, we would just stay home. But my MIL was waiting for her third and final flight to our local Urban Jungle and all the online tracking sites were saying it was still on time, so we really had no choice. We hopped in the car and drove towards the Urban Jungle. My wife really wanted to stop at the zoo there with our youngest. (Oldest was on spring break. More about that later.) I had been to that particular zoo hundreds of times during the years of my wife's residency with our oldest, it was cold outside and was forecasted to start blowing snow at any minute, so I just dropped them off and drove a quarter mile down the road to a fast food joint where I could read in a warm environment for an hour. I returned to pick them up when they were cold and frozen and we drove downtown. The snow was really coming down and already the streets were starting to get slick but we made it to a favorite of ours that we hadn't eaten at since my wif...

  I am making a push to clear out the pile of "stuff" that is piled to my immediate right blocking direct access to my filing cabinets. All the stuff came out of the old farm house and I am working to digitize it to share with my family and preserve it in some way for future generations. Most of it are photos and documents that previous people found worthy of saving. Most of it is known to me but occasionally I come across some unknown objects that I never knew existed. Most of the time those are physical 3D objects but on rare occasions, they are pictures. This post is about four such pictures that I just found and never knew they existed. Above is Roy E. Rice according to the script written on the back of the picture. It also says that the picture was taken in 1894 when Roy Rice was two. If you call, it was only recently I was pondering if he was even a legitimate son of Martin and Amanda Rice. It turns out he was. But doesn't this picture look very female to you? The ...

George William Meyer Family  Awhile back, while checking out the newly discovered Charles City digitized newspaper website, something caught my eye. On the very same page as my 3rd great grandmother Mary Meyer's death notice was an advertisement for a Meyer's clothing store. This caused me to pause.  As you may recall, Mary Meyer is my oft written about genealogy brick wall. She died at age 42 with few records and nothing to reveal who her parents were. Could the same Meyer who owns the clothing store be related? I didn't know. I don't recall ever having looked for Meyers in the Charles City area. I have looked for them in Galena, Illinois until I get blue in the face because that is where she meets my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck and gets married. John was such a nomad before and after that (living in Galena only a few years), that I has just assumed that they had left Galena living Mary's parents, if they were still alive or had immigrated with her, behind. But...

  With the room repainted and subsequently, six layers of paint smaller (three on each side), the carpet guys found a hole in their schedule and showed up a week early. The carpet install went without a hitch on their part though it did require me to shave a half inch off the bottom of the door so that is would swing freely. As soon as the installers left, I swept out the room and was going to install the closet for the rest of the day. On step two, I realized that I was still missing one box, containing three of the four vertical dividers.  I guess it is the number of boxes, but I already had three prior deliveries of all the components which my invoice said contained 12 boxes. I never bothered to count since the pile was quite large in our living room. But before I called, I checked my email and saw that I had an email from UPS saying I had a delivery for later that day so I waited. The missing box appeared at 5 PM and I had my schoolboard meeting in an hour so I didn't get ...

  Below is a portion of a blog post ChatGPT wrote about painting a mother-in-law's bedroom. In case you missed the news, ChatGPT is artificially intelligence used to write nearly anything you ask of it. Painting a room can be a fun and rewarding experience, but it can also be daunting, especially when it's your mother-in-law's bedroom. You want to make sure that you choose the right colors, do a good job, and make your mother-in-law happy. Here are some tips to help you paint your mother-in-law's bedroom. Choose the Right Colors Before you start painting, you need to choose the right colors for the room. The colors you choose should match your mother-in-law's style and personality. If she likes bold and bright colors, then you can choose a deep red or bright yellow. If she prefers more muted colors, then you can choose a soft blue or gray. It's important to keep in mind that the colors you choose will set the tone for the entire room. I will spare you the entire...

  Most people have a possibly 128 5th great grandparents. I only have 126 because of the loop in my family tree. Of those 126 great great great great great grandparents, all but one of them have been faceless with the exception of one on my maternal line on a well documented line. The one 5th great grandparent I have a picture of from that line is only a digital copy of the actual picture but one that I treasure. I treasure it because I just like to collect pictures of my ancestors. Partly out of curiosity of how traits get passed on from generation to generation and partly because it gives me a feeling of closeness to people who couldn't imagine me more than I can imagine their daily lives. I am proud of my collection of 18 3rd great grandparent pictures I have out of the possible 32 everyone has. (This is before the loop.) I keep searching for those holdout 14 pictures but know that I have slim odds of finding all of them due to some early deaths.  So while doing some auxili...