A Cool Pacific Northwest Kind Of Morning Coffee Muses

It’s a strange feeling morning. Kinda magical… Kinda spiritual… Kinda otherworldly. I feel as if I woke up in northwest Washington state… or Ireland. Overcast skies over a cornucopia of green shades and hues, each and everyone crying out to be the focus of my muse this morning. A soft breeze is barely stirring the trees and the day is cool enough that I’ve turned the ceiling fans to low.

I’ve been out for less than twenty minutes, and already three trains have roared by with train horns blowing on three sides at once. The train are loud, but highway traffic sounds are nonexistent. But the birds, singing high, singing low, songs of welcome, songs of joy… even the crows sound a bit more melodious. Ahhh, but the laughing gulls still sound the same…

I’ve been spending a lot of time on WikiTree.com this week. A big part of the time rewriting the profile biographies that are generated from my import of my family tree. In the process I am double checking sources. In the course of doing that I found that I had not managed to search out either of my parents on the 1940 federal census. After manually searching through the Orchard TX listings I did what every genealogist should do… I called my mother and asked her where her family was living in 1940. The answer surprised me. She told me she had lived in Boling until she finished the first grade. So both my mother and my father attended the same school at the same time just separated by 10 or 11 grades. After searching through the Boling area census page by page I found her and her family. They were mis-indexed because the census taker had really bad handwriting. Sewell was indexed as Seml, even Ancestry couldn’t make those match in a search.

After that success, I moved on to New Gulf and paged through till I found J P Boyd and family. Indexed right, but not showing up in searches for some reason… hmmmm.

Email calls, then the news, then climbing the proverbial family tree…