Abbott - The Great Mystery

My great-grandmother was married before she met my great-grandfather. Cora Hines was married to an Abbott. No one remembered his first name and I have not been able to find it. They could have married in Illinois, Ohio or possibly Switzerland, Jackson or Washington Counties in Indiana at an unknown date.

She was born March 8, 1870 in Cumberland County, Illinois. She married George Thomas "Old Tom" Jaynes September 11, 1896, at age 26. So sometime before that she married Mr. Abbott.
She had 2 children with Mr. Abbott. A daughter, Edna Catharine "Katy" Abbott was born May 9, 1892. She lived to be the ripe old age of 42, when she died of TB. I don't know whether their other child was born first or last. His name was Percy Abbott. He was said to be a sickly child, always weak and tired. The story was that he simply lay down on the floor one day and died. I have not found any evidence of the actual existance of this child. But he did exist.

A great-aunt said that both children were buried in Washington County, IN but Katy is buried beside her husband in Seymour, Jackson County, IN. So I have no idea where Percy was born, lived, died or buried. Very frustrating.

Cora and her parents lived for some time in Switzerland County, Indiana. They were George Washington and Agnes Joyce/Joice Hines. They both died in Neoga, Cumberland County, Illinois.

The only clue I have is a note I made many years ago. All it says is:

Seymour Weekly Democrat
Nov. 20, 1897
Percy Abbott

The library did not have that issue on microfilm. Is this about my Percy? I truly wish I had done a better job of sourcing my notes in those days. Let it be a lesson to all! You will not remember what it means and where you got it after 20 years has passed!!

At any rate the date would be about right. She was married to "Old Tom" when the child died.

Any Abbotts out there from the Illinois, Indiana, Ohio area?

• TwigTalk: My Janes/Jaynes Line
  


• TwigTalk: Meet Cora Hines Jaynes
  


• TwigTalk: Meet Agnes Joyce/Joice Hines
  

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July is Going to Be Remembered...

The first of this month my 14 year old niece ended up in the ER with a pain, which disappeared before they could do more than look at her. But on the safe side they did an x-ray. Something was watching over her. It was just an accidental finding. It didn't cause the pain. But it was cancer. Now, going into the last week of July with great relief, she is minus one kidney but recovering. Sounds like a simple thing, take it out and be done. But, of course, it isn't so simple. Nothing ever is. She is very brave. Very concerned about not upsetting her Mom and Dad. She is home now and on the mend.

Her life is forever changed. Probably the way she will look at life is changed. Her parents will never look at things the same either. I think such a crisis puts every thing into perspective for all that it touches. Suddenly the things you thought so important seem silly. The things you have put off seem so important. You look around you with refreshed vision, ready to see the small joys that come your way.

All in all it has been quite a month in just about every way. Not one I want to repeat, but that applies to all of my family. I will be glad to see it pass into history.

Direction?

I haven't had much time to blog lately. There are important things that require me to be completely present in the real world now and then. This has been a summer filled with such things, both good and bad. Life changing things.

But to get to a genealogical point, a crisis in research. Well, sort of. I had someone tell me that they had increased my file over 3000 people just by going to ancestry and collecting leaves. This was only a 2-line file. I worked for years to verify and find my people. My complete file is just over 3000. I was sitting and contemplating the damage done by such an act and thought, "I used to really do research". What a surprising thought out of nowhere. Being online has made me lazy about research. It's easy to become a 'name collector' in the online tree environment. The newbies coming up know only that environment. They are encouraged to just click here and the work is done for you. No matter that the data is wrong. Thomas MacEntee at his blog just recently posted "How Big Is It? Quality Over Quantity" hitting a nerve for me. The thought about my research and my goals for my work has been in the back of my mind now for a while. Every day it pops up to be ruminated over some more. I am not sure where it is leading me.

Also there is the mess with GenealogyWise, the Ning driven network site belonging to WorldVitalRecords (a $$ site). Not a wise start at all, it seems. I have gotten many invites, including one surprisingly from the site itself. But I am exhausted by keeping sites going and spending so much time trying to keep up. We all need community and I certainly enjoy it but how much is too much? I really like Facebook and a few others and would like to keep them. So perhaps a small, manageable network will fill the need. At any rate, I was trampled in the (what I believe was an engineered) early stampede to the site as it was not even open at the time. No one waited to see what it was before the great mass joining. So I decided to watch. Now there is a rather useless mess of groups of every imaginable kind that I, as yet, cannot see being helpful. Perhaps I am blind to the direction this is going. At any rate I am rather happy I sat it out. I am referring to Terry Thornton and the problems with posts being taken down when they don't go the way of the GW owner. On top of that I was unable to get Terrys blog to load today. It has been removed too. I hope Mr. Thornton shut it down himself, and not GW with Blogger. Though it is beyond my understanding why he would remove so much data. If he didn't, perhaps after this post my time is limited here as well. Whatever the answer to the disappearance of the blogs, there is a distinct odor in the air.

The whole mess just emphasizes to me the need for me to decide and weed out the things I do not find useful in my quest to find my family. A plan and focus on one line might be in order. All those old goals need to be brought out and dusted off.

Twitter isn't as helpful as I had hoped. And I am interested in more than just genealogy. I don't see how I can 'talk' to one interest without it going out to all. That is not good. Perhaps the AdobeAir programs such as TweetDeck and TWhirl do that, and I have them on my computer, but I don't want to expend the huge resources that I found they need to run. So I haven't learned to use them. Slows down the whole process. Firefox is such a memory hog it is hard to run anything as hungry as it (Firefox is an addiction). In Twitterfox you have no options. So I need to figure out how to work with it or settle on just reading them. Very interesting tweets though. I do enjoy reading.