Spring is almost here

With snow on the ground for most of the last month it's been impossible to go cemetery hunting. The cold weather has also kept me off the bike.

I haven't been able to do much with the Titus Atlas either as my program has been crashing a lot.The good news with the atlas though is that I'm down to only needing to do one more district, Frederick, which happens to be the largest. After that I will work on the smaller cities. I am hoping that there are only about 1600 more names to enter.

The Historical Society at least has kept me a bit busy. The last two times I was there they were fairly busy. A couple of times a distant relative has come in and I tried to help him out. He wanted to know where one of his Main family lived in downtown Frederick. We were able to find that he most likely lived in the old Barbara Fritchie cabins where the tea house was on West Patrick Street.

Post Card of the Barbara Fritchie Cabins

Now with TV!

At the time the Mains lived there it was also a grocery store.

Also while helping someone with their family history we ran into an interesting will. It seems that this man never married and when he died he left most of his belongings to his brothers and sisters. However, he also freed his female slave and her son. I would like to look further in to this to see if the son was possibly his.

For those motorcyclists out there, remember that the cages are not expecting to see you after the winter, and for those non-riders please remember to look for us bikers.

Old Documents and eBay

I peruse eBay quite a bit for things relating to Frederick. I've gotten lucky to once stumble upon some life insurance payouts from one of my great-great-grandparents to one of his daughters. I also occasionally bought something in the hopes that I might get lucky again. Below are two recent purchases.

Here is one such document, it's a loan paper from 1853. I bought 20 or so of such documents, most of them are from the Frederick county area, though I did get one that was from Frederick county Virginia. None of them deal with direct family members so I will most likely donate them to the Frederick County Historical Society at some point in the future.

This is a page from a ledger, I'm not fully sure what this ledger deals with as it was called the R.R. #4 ledger, but it deals mostly with flower, butter and other such things. There were originally some 250 pages, but the first 50 pages or so are missing. Some of the pages look like this, torn and bent, but 200 or so pages are in good condition. In this case I have gotten lucky, one of my great-great grandfathers is listed and has two pages of entries, it might not be much, but it does flesh out his life a bit.

Also note men are still named "of", as in this case, John Flook of H. The dates are from around 1905 so these were probably some of the last people named as such. Again, after copying the needed pages, this will most likely going to be donated to the historical society.