Sasquatch in my Shower!

Call it Sasquatch, Big Foot, Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, I don't care, all I do know is that I am pretty sure one has been sneaking into my house and taking showers on a regular basis. That's about the only thing that can possibly explain the amount of hair that we pull out of our drain. EWWWWW! I know. I'm also pretty sure that said sasquatch must suffer from that disorder where you are not able to pain the sensation of pain cause I SWEAR that every damn time I get in the shower in the morning certain parts of my body that one NEVER wants scalded get burned from how hot the water is. Now one would think I would be wise to the wicked ways of this little beast, but nope, not me. I just never learn!

Now, my husband has the crazy notion that the hair is not from a sneaky sasquatch but that it comes from me and my daughter. Personally, I ain't buying it since we both have full heads of hair. ----->

Now I know it's hard to tell how much I have cause it's up, but you will have to take my word for it. There's alot!! The more my hubby argues that the hair belongs to me and my daughter the guiltier he seems to appear. I'm thinking he just might know for sure where this hair has come from.

PETA Protest

So I'm driving home after dropping my son off at school and the news comes on the radio. The announcer is talking about a protest today in my fair city, put on by PETA, that is to take place today at 12:00 noon where they are going to have two young ladies showering at the head of King street to protest the excessive amount of water used during the cleaning of beef in plants. A banner is going to be used to cover their "unmentionables" as my ten-year-old would call them, but in the words of the oh-so-intelligent sounding girl that was interviewed "Let's just say we plan on being as naked as we are legally allowed" Their goal is to bring awareness and discussion. Now really PETA, is this really the best thing you guys could think up to bring awareness to your cause? Do you honestly believe those watching are gonna think Hmmmm......maybe vegan is the way to go or they gonna be thinking HEY HUNNY LET'S SEE SOME T&A. Did someone slip something into your salads to make you think that this was a great idea to bolster support for your cause? I wonder if the person who came up with this brilliant campaign was also the same dumbass who came up with the billboard campaign posted in two Canadian cities in 2004 that featured a photo of a woman and a pig head side by side, with the slogan "Neither of us is meat" made in reference to the Picton trial in BC where he killed many women and then fed their remains to his pigs.

While this blog may be part of your goal of "opening up discussion", it boggles my mind that your organization fails to see that campaigns such as this do not bring attention to you that brings more into your way of thinking but rather it pushes people away cause your way of bringing attention makes the cause itself a big joke.

Where the heck did they go? Part 2 - United States

So your ancestors have upped and moved away from their homes, their family and everything they knew to try and start a better life. While possibly a great move for them, sometimes for those of us left scrounging to find them, it can be a pain in the butt! Unless you have family stories they tell you where to look, most times you just pray you get lucky and find them in a census return. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Since they were normally only done every ten years (some states also did their own midway between the American census), sometimes you will just have ancestors that you can't find cause they moved around or died somewhere in amongst that ten year gap. Oh how I wish mine hadda stayed here, where I KNOW where to look. If you prefer to have all the census returns at the tip of your fingers in one place and are willing to fork over the cash, then ancestry is probably the way to go. If you are cheap like me (my hubby says I'm so cheap I squeak), then you probably want to find as many census returns as you can for FREE (ahhhh my favorite F word). You can find the 1850, 1870 and 1900 indexes and images on the familysearch pilot site listed below. Completely FREE! There are other ones there as well, but not all have the images available so you can be sure what was transcribed is actually the information that was recorded. The Washington site below has their 1910 images available on their site. You can also sometimes find information on some county/state rootsweb sites. Check them out.

Here are some of the American sites I have stumbled across. Again, some are indexes only so just be cautious. Just cause you find a name that matches someone you are searching, doesn't mean that IS who you are looking for. Investigate further to prove.

Illinois (Cook County) - www.cookcountygenealogy.com/Default.aspx

Maine Marriages - http://portal.maine.gov/marriage/archdev.marriage_archive.search_form

Maine Deaths - http://portal.maine.gov/death/archdev.death_archive.search_form

Massachusetts - http://www.sec.state.ma.us/vitalrecordssearch/

Massachusetts (Early Records) - http://www.ma-vitalrecords.org/Towns.shtml

Minnesota Births - http://people.mnhs.org/bci/

Minnesota Deaths - http://people.mnhs.org/dci/Search.cfm

Minnesota Marriages - http://www.mncounty.com/Modules/Certificates/Marriage/Default.aspx

New York - http://www.italiangen.org/VRECLIST.stm

Ohio (Cleveland Necrology File) - http://dxsrv4.cpl.org/WebZ/Authorize?sessionid=0&next=/html/obit_start.html&dbchoice=1:dbname=necr&bad=html/authofail.html&style=noframe

Oregon - http://genealogy.state.or.us/

Washington - http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/

Wisconsin - http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/vitalrecords/

And of course don't forget my favorite - http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#start This site has tons of American records! Check it out!!

Happy hunting!

Moms Know Best

Did your mother ever say to you, "No, you can't have a snack before bed. It will give you nightmares."

Well, I think she may have been right!

No idea how long I had been sleeping last night but all of a suddenly I am rudely awakened by screams of absolute terror!

GET OUT!!! GET OUT!!!!

RUNNNNNNNNNN! I SAID RUN!!!!!!!!!!

I'm so tired, I figure that IIIIII am the one dreaming so am still laying there, half asleep, half awake, then I hear it again.

GET OUTTTTTTTT! RUNNNNNNNNN!! Ummmm, I don't see you running???!!!

It was at this point I realized it wasn't me, it was the hubby.

Shhhhhhhh, you're having a dream, go back to sleep.

At this point, he sits straight up in bed, swings his legs over the side, and turns off the window fan and just sits there, with his hand still on it, still yelling, with the occasional (okay, more than occasional) FBomb thrown in for good measure.

At this point (before the neighbor's dial 911), I match see his Fbomb and match him a couple, tell him to lay down, shut the hell up and go back to sleep. (I'm not very pleasant when my sleep has been disturbed). He lays down, muttering, then silence. Unsure if it is safe for ME to go back to sleep incase he is gonna start screeching again, I ask what was chasing him. A couple of curse words come out in amongst him saying nothing was chasing him, he was chasing something. I ask what (I love having conversations with this man while he sleeps, it's hilarious) he was chasing. After much coaxing and prodding about what terrifying thing he was after (we watched something with vampires last night) He yells A CHAIR!!

A what???????!!!

I SAID A THIRTY FOOT HIGH CHAIR!!!

People, THIS is why ice cream before bed is NEVER a good idea!

Glutes of Steel!

No, not mine (mine would be more like Glutes of Costco-honking-big-chocolate-muffins) my ten year old son's glutes. Unlike myself who wakes up in the morning and is instantly up, both of my kids have inherited their father's sunny morning disposition in that they need to be woken up so they can fall back asleep to be woken up again and have this repeated about five times (don't even ask what I have threatened to do with hubby'a alarm clock). Since having to wake the dead is a pain in my glutes, I started making up silly songs to sing beside my kid's bedside in the morning to wake them up laughing. Instead of "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands" I've changed the word world to moon, at which point I grab their toushie, or Bum Bongos where I play the drums on their bums or Skinnamarinkie-dink (don't even dare THINK anything) where morning is a tickle at the neck, afternoon is the ribs, evening is waist and underneath the moon is self-explanatory. This morning's sing-song was skinnamarinkie-dink, as I got to underneath the moon, I zigged, the boy zagged and as a result I shoved my thumb into one of his little cheeks bending my damn thumbnail back and breaking it off below the skin? Or whatever you wanna call it where it attaches. ARGHHHHHHHH. Forget bouncing a quarter off that thing, I think you could bounce the whole damn mint off it. OUCH!

In other news, meet our new neighbors. Well they were, not sure if they still are. A couple months ago we noticed the hole in the attic vent of our neighbor's house. I commented to hubby how I didn't think it likely that the elements had done that over the winter, that maybe she had some unknown tennants, it wasn't till a couple weeks ago we met them.

It's not really a good picture, I know, but short of climbing up a ladder and asking him to come out and "Say Cheese" it's the best I could get. Up till last week, we thought it was just the one until the second little head popped out and said peek-a-boo!! It's Squirrel Times Two! So neighborlady had to call in PCO to give them their eviction notice before they start breeding like my guppies! He came yesterday to set the traps and was back today to check them, but not sure if they got them or they outsmarted PCO man. Pain in the glutes big gray squirrels may be, I still say they are damn cute.

It's true what they say!!

So last night hubby and I are out in the backyard, him being domestic, me pretending to be, making a new garden where he can grow even MORE freakin beans then he is already growing in one of our five (now six) gardens. I'm on the deck doing the "pretending to be domestic" and he is over at his truck shovelling off the load of dirt he got.

Man - "Nanc, stay out back"

Domestic Goddess (that's me!!) - "Huh?"

Man - "I said stay out back"

Me - "What? Why?" (I'm a woman of few words, except when I blog curiously)

Man - "Just stay out back"

Now, anyone that is a parent (except apparently the man who is a parent to our children) knows that if you tell someone NOT to do something, they are gonna walk right over top of you to do whatever it is they were told not to do. It isn't just kids that do this, who knew!!?? In my own defense, my first guess was that there was a rottie on our street and he didn't want me to see it so he could avoid the ahhhhhh I want a rottie so bad conversation (and I promise you, it has nothing to do with the fact my monster-in-law is terrified of them and has already proclaimed she will never step foot in our home again if we ever got one)

You guessed it, I start heading out front!

Man - "Nanc, I said stay out back, you don't need to see this."

Me - "See what"

Man - "For Fbomb sakes, a dog got hit by a car and is lying in the street"

Which of course sends me even faster out front cause my ten year old is three doors down playing with the neighbor's kids who happen to have a dog, so I automatically think OH GOD IT'S THEIR DOG AND WERE THE KIDS WITH HIM WHEN IT GOT HIT!!!!!????? Well, it wasn't their dog, who could have survived a car hit cause he is an average sized dog, but was the neighbor's two doors down who has a little yorkie. Anyone who has ever seen the size of a yorkie knows that any contact with a car ain't gonna end good for that doggie. Poor little Molly!!! :(

In other dog news, once hubby got the garden built, before filling it, we FINALLY buried my doggie Max who has been patiently waiting in his his little cardboard box (he was cremated) in my basement for about 12 years. Yeah yeah, 12 years - we "misplaced" him during renovations. (Thank god I never kept my mom's ashes when she died cause who knows where we woulda lost her.) As I open the baggie containing the remains of my very own first doggie Max and pour his ashes into the bottom of our garden I hear my hubby say "DAMNNNN he was a big dog." Men....

Where the heck did they go? Part 1 - Canada

So the bug has bit you and you are seeking out your great-grandparents. If they were born in Canada before 1911 you might be in luck! A great place to check for them are in census returns. In most provinces, these were done every ten years. Some you can find on-line, others you may have to actually go into a library to see if they have these on microfilm. Personally, I always try and track down the census returns for "my people" cause alot of times you might find "missing" people from other parts of your tree listed in a family member's home or children you did not know existed cause they died young in between census years. A word of caution, knowing how to SPELL usually was not a requirement to getting the job of being the census taker so you may need to "be creative" when thinking of ways the recorder (and sometimes the transcriber of the original record) MAY have spelled your family members name.

Here are some Canadian sites that may help you track down that illusive Uncle George:

Alberta: http://www.afhs.ab.ca/data/cemeteries/search.php This site contains about 165,000 cemetery records for the province of Alberta. Unfortunately, I've been unable to find any sites for this province that have vital stats.

British Columbia: http://bcarchives.bc.ca/ Click collections under the photo then Vital Event Records on the left. On the right you will find a list of the different vital records you can search. The best thing about the BC records is it lets you see deaths that are as current as 1989. Something not many do, the whole "privacy" thing. This site is basically an index.

Manitoba: http://vitalstats.gov.mb.ca//Query.php Again, more of an index (by that I mean no images with indepth information allowing you to be sure the John Smith you are looking for is the John Smith whose record shows up). This has births, marriages and deaths.

New Brunswick: http://archives.gnb.ca/Archives/Default.aspx?culture=en-CA If you hold your cursor on the word "Search" at the top left a drop down menu will appear with your options of records to search. You'll notice some of these options have arrows. That's cause there are more records available within those. Some of the records you can find here are births, marriages, deaths, Brenan's Funeral Home records and land grants. You can also find the link to the Newspaper Vital Statistics done by Danny Johnson under that search tab too! Here you will find information that was published in New Brunswick area newspapers between 1784 and 1896.

Nova Scotia: https://novascotiagenealogy.com A vital statistic site. Not to knock my own province's website, but this is one of my most favorite Canadian sites cause you can actually view the images of these documents right online, not just the indexed version. Anything that saves me money (not having to pay to order something) and time (not having to wait 3 plus weeks for a microfilm to come from the Provincial Archives) is always a bonus!!

Ontario: http://islandnet.com/ocfa/ This is more cemetery records. While great in directing you to where someone may be buried, it unfortunately contains no information about birth or death dates, just that someone with that name is there.

Prince Edward Island: http://islandregister.com Not like the majority of sites I have posted with Vital stats

Saskatchewan: http://www.isc.ca/VitalStatistics/Genealogy/vsgs_srch.aspx Again, more vital stats, however only birth and deaths at the moment. This is one of my newer finds

Other sites you can use to find cemetery records are www.findagrave.com and www.interment.net - both of these work for the States as well.

www.rootsweb.com is good and so is www.ancestry.com and ancestry.ca BUT the ancestry sites are only fully accessible if you purchase a subscription or your local library has.

But my all time favorite and most used site has got to be http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#start This particular one is global. Some of it is just indexed records but some have actual images you can view which is fantastic if you are like me and like to see that stuff to make sure what the index states it is is true (don't forget, alot of these records that are index only have been transcribed by a person who may have read incorrectly or noted it incorrectly and just has been staring at the microfilms for so long they are damn near big-eyed-blind!) When you go to the above link if you click "Search or Browse or Record Collection" you can search specifically by area record instead of the whole database.


******Now I'm not sure about provinces other than NS and NB, but if you know what county your relatives lived in within these provinces you might want to bring up your search engine and type in whatever County NB Genweb. This will usually get you the hit for the individual county's website which could have a great amount of information, and more importantly, a search bar on their site which will allow you to check for your families surname and see if they have any records posted related to them. For the record, I've done this with American counties too.

On-line Canadian Census returns:
www.automatedgenealogy.com Here you will find the 1851 census of NB, 1852 of Ontario and Quebec, 1901 of Canada, 1906 of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and the 1911 of Canada.

www.familysearch.org Here you will find the 1881 Census of Canada (as well as 1880 on the states and other records)

www.collectionscanada.ca/genealogy/index-e.html: Here you will be able to find the digitizedimages of the 1891 Canadian census. Also Attestation papers for your family if they served in WW1.

Other than ancestry which requires a paid subscription, everything else I have posted is 100% FREE!! Ahhhh, my favorite F word, despite some thinking it might be fudge.

Happy researching!

Whoooo are you? Who who who who

Now that I've got you all singing that darn song and thinking of Gill Grissom........

As some of you know, I have been researching my family tree for a few years now. Some people I know have expressed an interest in researching their own, but like me when I started, had absolutely NO CLUE how to begin, so instead of sounding like a broken record (in my own head) and repeating this to multiple people I'll tackle it here.

Start with what you know!!!

For me, that was a death notice for my great-grandmother that my beloved Grampy had kept for his mom that I now had possession of about five years ago. She came from a fairly large family (the second of seven) and thankfully her obit listed all her siblings and her parents, so that part was easy, but what then? Well, I had absolutely no clue where to go AFTER that. I was like Hansel and Gretel, wandering around lost in the woods, with no trail of bread crumbs to lead me where I needed to be, so I put it all to the side and forgot about it. A year or so later I met someone who did Genealogy as a job who threw me a trail of breadcrumbs to lead me down the right path. Now that I think about it though, since the family tree addiction has taken its hold, I think I am more lost in those darn woods then ever!

Talk to people

Go to your grandparents! Once you get past the smell of Chanel #5 and Bengay and talks about their bunions and dentures, the stories you may get are a researcher's dream!! So much of who we are and where we come from is lost cause we don't take the time to get to know those who have come and gone before us. Do be cautious though about assuming what you hear is the God's honest truth. It's not that they try to deliberately mislead you, but alot of times they retell stories that they heard from their parents, who heard it from their parents, who heard it from their parents, etc. It's like a hugh child's game of Telephone or telegram, I think we used to call it, where you get a bunch of kids sitting on the ground in a circle and you whisper something in the ear of the kid to the right of you and by the time it makes it back to you it has a couple words that you said, but it now contains more fiction that fact. (Of course, sometimes they do mislead you on purpose if it means revealing family skeletons hehe)

Sources

For the love of Pete, make note of them! Every single solitary little tidbit of information you get, keep track of WHERE you got it. This is the one thing the majority of new researchers DON'T do and wish someone hadda told them TO DO! As you research, it isn't a question of "if" you encounter conflicting information, it's a question of WHEN you encounter it. You do not want to be part of the probably 99.9% of researchers pounding your head against the desk yelling where the hell did I get THAT? Especially not if you are at the library. They tend to frown on that.

Do the work

Don't just go to ancestry, rootsweb, tribalpages or any of the other billions of family tree websites and punch in an ancestors name, come up with a tree (or twenty) that contains the name of the person you are looking for and assume, since John Doe has em listed, that what they have is fact. While a great starting point to point you where to go next, do your OWN work. Look at the information they show then go looking for where it came from. Majority of time these trees are NOT sourced and when you try contacting them, IF you are lucky to find someone with a still current email, chances are they have no idea where the hell the information came from cause they got it from someone else's tree on some site who got it from someone else and on and on. See Telephone game thingy above! Nowadays, there is really no excuse NOT to be able to do the work on your own since there are so many records available on the internet (that's another blog all in itself). Check the web for a state/province archives, or type in your search bar (insert states here) marriage/death/ or birth index.

Family Tree Software

If the bug bites ya, get yourself some type of Family Tree Software to keep your information in. You don't want a bunch of scraps of paper here and there that you KNOW are gonna get lost. Some can be expensive and other can be cheap (I got mine for ten bucks at Radioshack), others can even be FREE! Google is a wonderful thing, try using it to locate free ones. A word of advice with these though, create your gedcoms (a family tree file) and email it to yourself at your yahoo/hotmail/whatever account. Last thing you want to do is lose years worth of work if something happens to your computer. Backing it up alone ain't gonna do diddly squat if someone steals your computer or your house catches on fire.

I'm sure there is more I missed but that's all I can think of. If you made it through the whole thing, you are obviously interested in genealogy and just really damn bored, either way thanks for dropping by!

Welcome!

Hello again everyone!

I've decided to start up a brand new blog since most of you know who I am now thanks to Facebook. I'd REALLY like to try and keep this as nice, friendly and CLEAN (yeah I know, doesn't THAT suck) as I can since it will be linked to my facebook account. Please keep in mind I have some family and a 14-going-on-25-teen who may peek in from time to time, so I would appreciate it if you could try and leave your F-bombs and boxing gloves with the coatcheck girl. I promise you will get them all back in tip-top shape on your way out!

So I guess a bit about me for those that don't know me that well, I'm a stay at home mom to two kids, a fourteen year girl and a ten year old boy, and I guess you could say a 37 year old man too since some men can be just as bad as kids. Toss that damn Star Wars cartoon on and the boy and hubby are like open mouthed drooling zombies, I swear! Okay, I'm lying, my son doesn't drool. (Incase you haven't caught on yet, I tend to be a tad sarcastic. For those that like that, FANTASTIC, for those that don't well, I'll leave that part with the coatcheck girl!) I'm not really a people person, they tend to annoy the crap outta me. Not because I am anti-social in general, but because I can only handle so much "oh boohooo poor me" before I wanna go to Home Hardware, buy a shovel and tarp and ask the boohoo'r if they wanna go on "a picnic". Luckily for the boohoo'rs in my life, I'm lazy and HATE breaking a nail, so the chances of me using the shovel to dig a hole are pretty slim. Although I suppose I could club em with it?