Tag: family

Family Haunts

Posted on By Tom 6 Comments on Family Haunts
History and Genealogy, Photography

Road to the Home Place

I have always enjoyed looking at the photos of Scott West (South Carolina’s Northern Kingdom). Scott and I seem to cover some of the same territory in Laurens County, and I’ve always admired his gutsy trespassing to get great shots of the interiors of old abandoned houses and interesting places.

Recently, Scott posted a couple of pictures of the old Poole Homestead in the Long Branch Community of Laurens County. I immediately recognized the place as being in one of the old photos my Dad has. After a couple of message exchanges it turns out that we do have some distant family connections (don’t ALL Southerners?) and that some of his family had attended Long Branch Pentecostal Holiness, where my father had pastored years ago.

That brings us to this Tuesday. My mother had taken a trip to visit her sisters in North Carolina, so my Dad was on his own for the week. Since I was on spring break, I decided to head down and hang out with him, and see if I could find this photo of the Poole Homestead. I did find it, and we decided to take a tour of some of the old family haunts throughout Newberry and Laurens Counties.

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A Question of Ancestry

Posted on By Tom No Comments on A Question of Ancestry
History and Genealogy, Internet

Over the weekend I signed up for a free two-week trial of Ancestry.com. I guess I fell prey to their recent marketing campaign, which shows users discovering new things about their families as “leaves” appear on their family tree. I had already amassed quite a bit of data on our family, so I was curious to see if I could add to my list.

It has been several years since I’ve done any serious research on our family’s history. Even then I’ve been more of a collector than actual researcher, depending upon the prior research of several cousins and some nice folks that I’ve met online, such as Dan Ellenburg in Pittsburg, with his excellent website on the Ellenberg family. By using several sources I’ve found some conflicting data, and have had to do some verification before merging various data sets. I figured that would also be the case with Ancestry.com, and I was certainly right.

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A Green Cadillac Hearse and Mistaken Identity

Posted on By Tom 1 Comment on A Green Cadillac Hearse and Mistaken Identity
Weirdness

While on our journey to the promised land, Glynda and Houston and I reminisced about another [mis]adventure from over a decade ago. Since this was pre-RandomConnections, the episode was never properly documented. So here, for the first time, is the tale of “The Green Cadillac Hearse and the Case of Mistaken Identity”…

The year was 1997 and I was still a teacher. This was in the pre-digital days, and I was using a Canon Xapshot video still camera from my classroom. This particular camera recorded still images onto an analog disk similar to a floppy disk. It was one of the first cameras that could record images that could be erased later. The images were transferred to computer via an image capture card, which could also do video stills from a camcorder.

Houston had come up to visit and we were on one of our photo rambles, this time staying fairly close to home. My intent was to capture some interesting textures as backgrounds for some classroom web projects we had underway. While I did get some good textures from that trip, the other things I captured would never make it into the classroom.

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Bound for the Promised Land

Posted on By Tom 18 Comments on Bound for the Promised Land
History and Genealogy, Local, Photography, Travel

What more could you want?

On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wishful eye
to Caanan’s fair and happy land where my possessions lie.

I am bound for the promised land, I’m bound for the promised land.
Oh, who will come and go with me, I am bound for the promised land.

The trip was going to be a ghost-hunting expedition for Eric Rogers and me. Eric and I had finally met offline, and were planning a joint expedition to the haunted Rock House just south of Greenwood. Since we would be down in that area, we had also plotted out some other interesting locations. I had flagged one little town, Promised Land, SC, with the comment, “With a name like that, how could we NOT go there?”

Eric was not able to make the trip, but my brother Houston and sister Glynda were able to go. Houston took on the role of Aaron, the spokesperson, with Glynda as Miriam, and me as Moses, leading and documenting our trip. So early Sunday morning we found a suitable radio evangelist and headed for the Promised Land. We hoped we would make it all the way, further than our biblical counterparts.

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