Riverbend Journal

  When it comes to genealogy research, two dates really stand out due to the repercussions left in their wake.  1. 20 Jan 1921 - The date a fire started in the U.S. Department of Commerce building destroying almost the entire 1890 Census record. 2. 12 July 1973 - The date when a fire started on the 6th floor of the National Personnel Records Center destroying millions of records being stored there at the time comprising 80% of all army records and 75% of all air force records.  This post is about the 2nd fire. The first calls about the fire came in only minutes past midnight on July 12th stating that the 6th floor of the building was on fire and firefighters were quickly dispatched. They fought the fire for nearly 3 hours before having to withdraw due to heat and smoke and then pretty much let it burn for the next 22 hours before trying again to put the fire out. Forty-two fire districts got involved pumping water onto the flames from outside the building and sometime on ...

  While cleaning out an old drawer at the farmhouse my grandfather built, I ran across this picture of my grandfather (on left) apparently taken during his service in World War II. Many years ago, when I was doing military research into a number of other ancestors, mostly Civil War and World War I era, I had requested my grandfather's military records as well. However, I was disappointed when they responded that there were none to send to me as they had all been destroyed by a fire in 1973. My grandfather never really talked about the war at all. I seem to remember him once saying he had driven a truck in Africa but that was the sum total of what I remember. So I decided I needed to do a little more digging and see what I could turn up. At that time, my torn rotator cuff muscle was keeping me from sleeping for long periods of time so I had plenty of time to kill in the wee hours of the morning while others were still sleeping. The first clue I turned up was on Ancestry where there ...

  If I had a dollar for every time someone showed me a family tree with ties to royalty, I would be able to afford several high end steak dinners as a result. My quibble with this isn't that they think they are related to royalty because most of us our indirectly, but rather due to direct route up the tree that involves more often than not 12 years and younger or 45 year old and over women giving birth to descendants. This is one of the easiest ways to spot wishful family trees. These family trees are full of wishful thinking with absolutely no proof having been obtained. It is a tempting thing to see someone with the same or similar last name and add them to your tree thinking they have to be your ancestor. It only takes a few to succumb to that temptation and errantly add an incorrect person to their PUBLIC family tree and then it propagates like a weed as hundreds if not thousands of others come after and copy that information assuming it to be correct and assuming the other per...

Per family tradition, shortly after Thanksgiving, our family liberates an Eastern Red Cedar tree from its earthly toil to use for our Christmas tree. This year, due to a torn rotator cuff, we put it off a week before I got the above supplies ready in the back of our van. It always looks like I am on my way to dispose of a body so just in case a police officer might think so too, I always obey all traffic rules extra close. For most of the decades, the cedar trees have been cut down on the farm. They grow wild and are prolific but are undesirable by many. As a results, the stands still on the farm have matured while the young trees that grow around the fringes have been removed to prevent them from infringing on good farm land. It became harder and harder to find a tree and so for the last few years, we have looked elsewhere.  Another acquaintance of mine bought 40 acres of land that was chock full of cedar trees but he has grand ideas of cutting them all down for some vague reasons...

  A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I started building a porch swing and then got interrupted with life, the high heats of summer, life and now we are going through a classic fall much like we had last year with mild temperatures in the afternoon. So with some free time, I dusted off the porch swing project and got to building the back.  The plans called for an arched  back and an overly complicated process for the joinery that would create lots of future problems with water migration so I just set them aside and other than the general dimensions, winged it. Instead of cutting mortises and tenons on everything, I just cut mortises on everything and glued in tenons. It doesn't seem like much difference typing that sentence but in reality, it took probably a week long project and condensed it down to one afternoon.  After the glue dried, I scraped and sanded everything which took quite awhile and clamped it in place just to check out proportions, since ...