I am going on vacation soon, but you, dear readers of my blog will never know it. You won’t know when I leave home or when I get back. We live in quite the technologically modern age. I can co-ordinate behind the scenes to make sure the blog continues to post while I am gone. For the last few weeks I have been doubling up on my scanning and transcribing duties. Instead of doing a letter a day, I’ve been doing two, three or even four.  On some days, I forget that I have already read ahead and my readers have not. The most important part of the process is the scanning. As long as I get the letters scanned and online, I can do everything else from the road. While I am gone, I will be able to continue to text and call family. It makes me think how much easier it might have been for my grandparents during World War II, but then we wouldn’t have their wonderful letters to read.

My children have never been to where I grew up. I have wanted to show them the east coast for awhile (plus there are old friends I haven’t seen in ages). We live in the town where their father grew up. They know where he went to school and they have seen the various places from his childhood. This summer we will walk upon the matrilineal ancestral grounds. Through an interesting quirk of fate, my mother was the first generation on her mother’s side NOT to have been born in Massachusetts in over 300 years (at the time of her birth). Luckily for me, she returned to Massachusetts where I was born. The earliest known female in my direct matrilineal line was a woman named Susannah Leach. She was born in Massachusetts in 1703. I have yet to discover her parentage. In 1720, at the age of 17 years, she married Isaac Churchill. They had 7 children. Susannah died at the grand age of 87 in 1790. Both Leach and Churchill are surnames that crisscross my maternal family tree through several generations.

Since we also descend from several pilgrim families one of our destinations is Plymouth, Massachusetts to  explore Plimouth Plantation and the Mayflower II. I have seriously tried to limit the urge to drag my children through endless cemeteries. BUT this morning on the ride to school I asked my daughter if she would be willing to go to a cemetery or two. She begrudgingly agreed. She is not so thrilled with the residents of the animal kingdom that we come across in graveyards, i.e. spiders and the occasional grass snake. Last night, it popped into my head that I should try finding the grave of Marcia Leach (who is possibly related to Susannah but I don’t know how). When Marcia was born, her family lived in Plymouth. As a young girl, the entire family moved to Lynn, presumably for the job opportunities the factory town provided. After Marcia’s brief marriage that produced my great, great grandfather, Marcia and her sister Lizzie lived together for the remainder of Marcia’s life in Lynn.

I am not sure what happened to Lizzie after Marcia’s death in 1911. Several of their siblings are buried at the Pine Grove Cemetery in Lynn, Massachusetts. However, on the death records for Marcia and her parents, even though their deaths occurred in Lynn, burial was given as Plymouth with no cemetery listed. NO CEMETERY LISTED!!! Do you know how many burials there are in the second oldest European settlement in our country? Talk about the proverbial needle in a haystack. To make matters worse, Plymouth has all their known burials online. And guess what? Nothing. Marcia and Lizzie’s brother Robert died in 1902. His death record even gives a cemetery in Plymouth, Vine Hills. Again, nothing. The only Robert Leach buried in Plymouth is their uncle Robert Bartlett Leach. I even resorted to calling the Cemetery Department this morning to see if they could help. Let me just tell you how much I abhor talking on the telephone. It was a big deal for me to make that call. The clerk who assisted me was very kind but she wasn’t able to shed any light on the matter. She even looked at the old cemetery cards for Vine Hills. So at this point, I may just have to come to grips with the fact that I may never find Marcia’s grave. I suspect that this family may not have been well off and may not have been able to afford a plot or cemetery stones. My last resort is to contact the cemetery in Lynn and see if she is buried there, despite the notation that her burial was in Plymouth.

And now that I have taken the time to rant about my genealogical brick wall for the day, I must get back to transcribing those letters. I don’t want you to miss out while I am away.

This week I am being honored with the Liebster Blog Award. For those of you who have never heard of it before, the Liebster is given to newer bloggers with less than 200 followers. Liebster is the German word for “favorite”. The award is typically passed on once you receive it, being a sort of the chain letter for blogging. Once you have been nominated you need to answer eleven questions posed by your nominator, select eleven blogs you would like to nominate, and then come up with eleven questions for the new award recipients that you want answered. Whew!

I was honored by ljhlaura who writes the Branch and Leaf Blog. She was one of my earliest followers. Since I am still relatively new to blogging, I had a hard time coming up with eleven blogs with less than 200 followers. Many of the blogs that I follow at this point have large followings so they are ineligible for nomination. Two examples are Judy Russell’s The Legal Genealogist and Hinges of History. If you follow genealogy blogs, you KNOW who Judy is. Hinges of History is a blog that I only discovered this last week. Its entire focus is the WAVES of World War II. The WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, were women who enlisted in the Navy. More than 100,000 of these amazing women signed up during World War II. I would like to think that my grandmother might have signed up if she had been 10-15 years younger and had not had a family at home to care for.

I tried to be diligent and make sure that the blogs I nominated had less than 200 followers. Unfortunately, not all the blogs I am nominating have their numbers of followers posted so I tried my best. Many of these bloggers welcomed me right from the start and I can’t wait to read each one of their new posts every day (or week).

1. Mustang.Koji and his blog Masako and Spam Musubi
2. Jenn, aka the Writer Gril, and her genealogy blog Unveiling My Past
3. Donna Catterick and her new genealogy blog This I Leave
4. Grant Davis and his blog The Stephen Sherwood Letters
5. Kaitlin and her blog Keeping History Alive
6. Chris Wimsatt at The Buff Genealogist
7. Sheryl and her blog A Hundred Years Ago (I know she’s just over 200 followers, and I don’t care!)
8. Jacqui Stevens  and her blog A Family Tapestry
9. Gpcox at Pacific Paratrooper 
10. Jaggh53163 at “Greatest Generation” Life Lessons
11. Susan Buck and her blog Branches of Our Family

So here are the questions I was asked and my answers:

1. When did I start my blog? I started my blog over this last Thanksgiving on November 23, 2012.
2. What motivates you to write? I am not sure I have an answer to this one….I feel a great need to share my grandparents’ letters and to write down some of my family research before the stories or the letters get lost forever. I never really thought much about being a writer so I feel somewhat odd calling myself one.
3. Do you have closer to a dearth of a plethora of writing ideas to bring to fruition? I love the word plethora. We used the word a LOT in college. I would say that I have a plethora of documents and a whole heck of a lot of source material to draw upon. I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon.
4. Did you have a hard time naming your blog? I’ve gone by the moniker genealogy lady for awhile now (cough…well over a decade). My husband starting using it as a nickname for me when I would disappear into the office and not emerge for hours. It just seemed like the natural name for my blog.
5. Where were you born? I was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
6. How far to you currently live from where you were born? I am about as far as you can be and still be in the continental United States.
7. Where would you live if you could live anywhere? I love the idea of living in Ireland, Scotland, Great Britain, etc. but I would probably be happiest somewhere in the mountains, in the woods near a lake, with very few people around.
8. What’s your favorite season? Tough one as I like each season individually.
9. Why is your favorite season your favorite? I like Winter for the snow and the holidays; I like Spring for its sense of newness and everything being reborn and the coming of warmer days; I like Summer for its heat, childhood memories of lazy days of camp on the lake, and its carefreeness; I like Autumn for the beautiful fall colors (which I rarely see anymore) and changing temperatures and the year end rituals of harvest & Halloween
10. More introvert or extrovert? Hands down I am an introvert, and proud of it!
11. What kind of people inspire you? Fearless & brave people; those who are not afraid to fight for their causes or against injustice; people who stand up to bullies and defy the odds.  Whether it was the brave women who fought for our right to vote, abolitionists who helped slaves escape the south, Germans who hid Jews during World War II, or the kid who stands up for his friend against the bully on the playground.

My questions for my nominees: 1) Why did you start your blog? 2) Name a hobby besides genealogy/writing that you also love. 3) Who is your favorite ancestor? 4) What is your favorite book? 5) If you could meet one of your ancestors, who would it be? 6) Why did you choose that ancestor? 7) If you could go back in time, what period would you chose? 8) Who is your most frustrating brick wall ancestor? 9) What is your favorite ice cream flavor? 10) Are you a professional genealogist or do you just this for “fun”? 11) Cat or dog person?