Skip to main content

Featured

A Research Trip is Just the Ticket

Image by rawpixel.   This week's post will be brief. I am busy preparing for a research trip later this week.  My paternal grandmother's ancestors are my focus. Mary Josephine Baker (1911-1981) had Belgian, Irish, German, and Scottish roots with families that first settled in the Buffalo/Sheldon/St. Catharines, Ontario areas. I've spent a good part of the past two years researching their stories and am anxious to set my feet on the ground where they lived: Buffalo, Erie, New York - Cassidy, Sheridan, and Coats families N. Evans, Erie, New York - Sheridan family Grantham/St. Catharines/Port Dalhousie, Ontario - Becker/Baker, Schiltz, Cassidy, Darragh, Dyer, Manley families Sheldon, Wyoming, New York - Schiltz, Becker/Baker, Cailteux lines  Each of these locales is within easy driving distance from Buffalo, so that will be my hub with day trips out to the various locations. I've set an ambitious schedule and am gathering visit info, making arrangements with my contacts, s...

FAVORITE PHOTO

by Nancy Gilbride Casey


This favorite photo of many I have taken over the years comes with a special anecdote.

When our daughter Anne (then known as Annie), was preschool age, she dedicated great parts of each day drawing with markers, painting with watercolors, coloring in books. In summer, she drew with chalk on the sidewalk. 

Every gift-giving occasion was another opportunity to buy a new box of crayons or paints, and reams of paper, tablets large and small, and sheaves of manila and construction paper to feed her never-ending appetite to draw.

Her artwork covered our refrigerator, was sent on to grandparents, and hung on our office bulletin boards. 

Art was already ingrained into her little personality.

Each day Annie created literally a dozen or more creations, in a free flow of imagination, wild, exotic, and uniquely from her sometimes funny and observant perspective.

On the occasion of this photo, I captured her one morning, sitting at her little art easel, paintbrush in hand, engrossed in one of that day's many creations.

"Are you going to be an artist when you grow up, Annie?" I asked.

Without taking her eyes off her artwork, and without skipping a beat, she replied,

"But Mommy...I already AM an artist!"

To this day, I can't argue with that.

 

Until next time...
 
This post was inspired by Amy Johnson Crowe's 52 Ancestor in 52 Weeks Challenge

Subscribe to "Leaves on the Tree," to receive more family history stories, right in your email box. Click the green Subscribe link above.

 

 

 

 

 


 

Comments