Virginia Allain

In participating in the Sepia Saturday picture challenge, I rummaged about hunting a photo of soldiers. I’d already shared this one of my mother’s cousin. You can read more about Ralph Vining’s fascinating life here. It was a good match for the photo…

Sadly, many families have a stash of unlabeled ancestor photos. They end up wondering, “who are these people?” Sadder still, some end up tossing them out when they get discouraged over identifying the mystery photos. The ones I’m sharing here today…

Lois Adelaide Joy was the third daughter born to George Washington Joy and Dacy Richards. Lois’ younger brother, Alfred Joy was my great-grandfather. She was born September 25, 1867 in Vinland in the eastern part of the new state of Kansas. Her older…

I set to work today sorting out the Sarah Bucklands on my family tree. They were really confusing me, so I’ll separate them out here with some sources relating to their lives. Sarah Smith Buckland Sarah Smith is my 4th great-grandmother. Her father,…

This month, I’ll be featuring women from my family tree for Women’s History Month. I’ll launch this with my fourth great-grandmother, Charity Bourne. Her parents were William Bourne and Rosamond Jones (called Rosa). I wrote earlier about their burial…

A Goal for 2021 One goal for me this year is to share the bits and pieces of family history that I find. Some stories will never be fully revealed to the current generation as they are lost to living memory and otherwise undocumented. Even though I…

My 2nd great-uncle, Erastus Laban Tower, served a number of years as the postmaster in Uniontown, Indiana. I wanted to find out more about his time as postmaster which at first I thought spanned from 1886 to 1911 (his obituary). Then I found that he…

The prompt for the 52 Ancestors challenge was “beards,” so I started hunting through my family photos for bearded fellows. Wanting to be thorough and systematic, I started with the Kansas Vinings. It turns out that they were a pretty clean-shaven…

My older brother, just a toddler, had a jumper chair back in 1946. We have the picture of him looking quite happy being able to bounce up-and-down and kick his feet in this device. He is outside in the yard and his eyes are fixed upon either mom or…

Peter Joy, my 7th great-grandfather, left England in 1663 for the British Colony of Maryland. His parents Mary Dover and Richard Joy had died in 1630 when Peter was just 2-years-old. The family had lived in Kingston Upon Thames, Surrey, England which…

I can rattle off the surnames that populate our family tree after some years of working on them. There’s Martin, McGhee, Vining, Joy, Stone, Kennedy, Tower, Babcock, Buckland, and Richards. I’m getting more familiar this year with Summers, Ellison,…

It impressed me when I saw the advanced age that my 2nd great-grandfather lived to be. Born in 1837, he lived until 1930 after surviving the Civil War and 6 months in Andersonville as a prisoner of war. It gladdened me to have such a hardy soul on my…

The beach pictures in our family album are few and far between. Kansas was a shallow sea back 85 million years ago but no photos of our family go back that far. The Martins, Joys, Kennedys, Vinings, and McGhees were later arrivals from 1850s onward.…

It’s Sepia Saturday time again so I’m rummaging out some vintage photos. The inspiration photo is 1950s, people celebrating Christmas, kissing, and soldiers in uniform. Hmm, what do I have to match that assortment of themes? Here’s a 1957 photo of my…

The 52 Ancestors prompt for this week was “should be a movie.” I tried to decide what family story was worthy of becoming a movie. Would it be our great-great-grandfather, James Vining, in the Kansas Cavalry protecting the wagon trains from the…

My mother’s aunt, Bertha McGhee taught in New Mexico back in 1929 – 1930. She and some friends had some time away which they spent camping out in a small cabin and cooking over an open fire. We don’t know the location or who the other women are. It’s…

It’s not always easy to find where an ancestor was buried. Quite often in colonial and pioneer times, families started their own family plot for burials. Time passed, families moved on or died out, and all that was left was an untended, isolated…

I should have plenty of relatives to research and not go off on tangents tracking ones that don’t fit my family tree. While hunting newspaper stories about our Richards family in the Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers, I found this sad story. Harry…

My grandmother, Cora Joy, was 13 years old in 1909. There she stands in the back row, 3rd from the right in this school photo. The Joy family lived in Hamilton, Kansas at this time. I’m curious about the identity of the other students. Even…