Archive for December, 2009

by Sherry Stocking Kline
December 13, 2009

The following is part of the Advent Calendar Challenge, thanks to GeneaBloggers Thomas MacEntee!

Charitable/Volunteer Work

Did your family ever volunteer with a charity such as a soup kitchen, homeless or battered women’s shelter during the holidays? Or perhaps were your ancestors involved with church groups that assisted others during the holiday?

When I read this challenge, my conscience was pricked.  Pretty hard, too. Ouch.

Do we do this during the holidays.   No, not that I can ever recall did we, nor do we now during holidays.

I felt terrible.  And then a little voice inside me reminded me that throughout the year, we do ‘things’ that make other peoples lives a little bit easier.

Growing up on a farm and a rural community the farm families’ were close.  If your neighbor (and that includes people miles away) were ill, suffered a family loss, had surgery, died, etc., the word would go out, and food began to arrive. Almost immediately.

Prayer chains were begun and good, home-cooked meals were made and delivered with caring, concern, and love. Funeral dinners were provided, and funerals were well attended.   “Can we help?”  What can we do?”  These questions were asked and meant.  If the husband were ill, fields were plowed, cows were fed, or cows milked.  We were a part of the giving.  And when my dad passed away, of the receiving.

Growing up, I never heard of battered women’s shelters or food banks.  Did they exist?  Surely they did, but not in my tiny town, and maybe not even in the nearby one I now  live in.     But they do now.

My inner voice reminded that now we donate to a battered women’s shelter in Oklahoma where my cousin works, to a Christian group here that helps pregnant teens and other mothers with supplies when they are faced with a surprise pregnancy, to the food bank here in town.

Because we’ve had three family members die from leukemia and lymphoma, I volunteer and walk with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s “Light the Night” walk.  The money helps families with information and  expenses when someone gets a leukemia diagnosis. You can click here, and find the chapter near you, links to donate, and information if you or a family member needs it.

And when the health and wellness company that I’ve been a part of for nearly ten years began the “Save a Child” program to save the lives of children who were dying from malaria I began donating every month.

For every $10 bottle of silver I purchase, the company matches it with another.  And ships them to Africa, where each bottle saves the lives of at least two children.  Interested? E-mail me at Sherry@familytreewriter.com for more info.

But my conscience still pricks me because there isn’t anything special I do just at Christmas time.  I hope to make next year’s post different.

Getting accepted by Technorati includes posting a blog post that includes this UUPF9WXDK8KR bit of info!

Woo hoo!

by Sherry Stocking Kline
December 14th, 2009

The first time I heard Kathy Mattea singing this song written by Mark Lowery and Buddy Greene, it became one of my new Christmas favorites. And this version, sung by Mark Lowery himself and accompanied by Guy Penrod and David Phelps is beautiful.

Mary, Did You Know?

Lyrics by Mark Lowery, music by Buddy Greene

Mary Did you Know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?
Mary Did you Know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?
Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?
This child that you delivered will soon deliver you?

Mary did you know that your baby boy will give sight to a blind man
Mary did you know that your baby boy will calm a storm with his hand
Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod?
When you kiss your little baby, you’ve kissed the face of God.
The blind will see, the deaf will hear, and the dead will live again
The lame will leap, the dumb will speak, the praises of the Lamb.

Mary, Did You Know that your Baby Boy is Lord of all creation?
Mary Did you Know that your Baby Boy will one day rule the nations?
Did you know that your Baby Boy is Heaven’s Perfect Lamb
This sleeping child you’re holding is the Great “I AM…..”

After watching “The Nativity Story” this past weekend with my family, it made me want to ask Mary some questions myself.

Mary, what did you think when shepherds began showing up at the stable? How amazed were you when the wise men came and brought gifts? And such expensive ones?

Did you use those gifts to keep Jesus safe from Herod when you had to hurry away from Bethlehem and stay in Egypt?

Did you ever think “oh, my gosh, what if I hadn’t listened to the dream that told Joseph to take the child to Egypt” to keep him safe?

What did you see when Jesus was young that made you certain he could turn the water into wine?

Mary, What Did You Know?

Merry Christmas to you and yours….

by Sherry Stocking Kline
December 14th, 2009

Thanks to Thomas MacEntee of GeneaBloggers for today’s Christmas Advent Calendar Challenge!

Fruit Cake – Friend or Foe?

Did you like fruitcake? Did your family receive fruitcakes? Have you ever re-gifted fruitcake? Have you ever devised creative uses for fruitcake?

(Note: you can also post about a “fruitcake ancestor” and use it for Madness Monday!)

We didn’t receive very many fruitcakes when I was growing up…

Just lucky, I guess!

But my mom professed to love them, so occasionally she would buy one.  It usually never got finished, so how much could she actually love them, right?

Me, I tasted one or two, didn’t care for the rubbery candied fruit, and considered myself a Fruitcake hater.

Many years later, after I was grown and working at a federal government farm office the local grain elevator who always gave our office Christmas gifts of one sort or another, usually food or candy, gave us some fruitcakes.

“Oh, great,” I thought,  “They usually give us good gifts, and this year  –  Fruitcake!”

They seemed to be filled with a little extra Christmas Cheer…

Everyone else dived in (except for me) and exclaimed how good it was!   It also seemed they were traveling back to the break table just a little extra often to grab a piece of that fruitcake, and maybe it was my imagination, but they seemed to be filled with a little extra ‘Christmas Cheer,’ too.

Finally, not wanting to miss out on anything I decided to give the fruitcake a one-time try.

Mmmmm?  This can’t be  fruitcake, I thought.  The fruit wasn’t rubbery and tasteless and what in the world was this stuff marinated with?

It wouldn’t have passed the “Southern Baptist” test…

Mmmmm….  Whatever it was, it wouldn’t have passed the teetotaling “Southern Baptist” test that Whitney Clare writes about in her Advent Calendar Challenge!  And whatever it was, it was worth a second piece, and a third.

It was a pretty ‘cheery’ Christmas around there till the fruitcakes were gone, and  doggone it, I never did find out where the elevator bought those fruitcakes ….

It’s Saturday Night!  And below is the SNGF Challenge from Genea-Musings Randy Seaver!

Cue up your “Mission Impossible” music, or maybe you really ought to turn on your favorite Christmas Songs!  Either Way, Enjoy!

Welcome to SNGF — it’s Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun!

We had a great response last week to our Dear Genea-Santa wish list – thank you all for posting – perhaps you can use that post as a start for the upcoming Canrival of Genealogy with the topic of “Dear Genea-Santa.” My apologies for duplicating the theme last week.

I think that we all want lots of imaged and indexed databases online for our pajama-clad viewing pleasure… so for this week’s SNGF, let’s express our wishes for databases we want the genealogy companies to bring to us:

1) Define one or more genealogy or family history databases, that are not currently online, that would really help you in your research. Where does this database currently reside?

2) Tell us about it/them in a blog post on your own blog or GenealogyWise or Facebook, in a comment to this blog post, or in a comment to this post on Facebook.

This one is really easy.

I’ve sat at my computer in sweats and jammies in the wee hours many nights  just wishing that every small-town’s newspaper where my ancestors (and my family here, for that matter!) lived in were on-line and available for research.

Just think!  You could do your census and then check for the obituaries!

Indexed, too?  Oh, be still my heart!

The problem with that is, I believe, financial. For the companies who are making this kind of wonderful technology available. Say for Ancestry.com to want to do this, they would probably want to justify the numbers.

So just how many descendants might be looking?

Many of my ancestors lived in very rural areas, and the tiny town newspaper I might be searching for might be serving a population of less than 500.  Maybe even a lot less.

I figure my great-grandfather now has somewhere between 2 and 3 hundred descendants.  If everyone in my tiny town of Mayfield, Population then about 100, (area population maybe another 3 to 4 hundred) population now about 100, (area population probably a bit lower now) had 200 descendants looking, they might only be talking about 3,000 to 5,000 individuals at the max who might be looking?

Anyone want to guess with me?

On the other hand, there are always peripheral family members researching family, so could the number looking be higher?

And my tiny town had a newspaper for less than a year, so it wouldn’t take them long to scan, so is that a plus or a minus?

On the other hand, if there were actually 5 to 6 thousand plus individuals involved what percentage of those would be researching and paying a monthly or yearly subscription to access this information.  And will those numbers ever justify scanning the small-town newspapers?  I sure hope so!

Anyhow, that’s my wish, Santa!

Anyhow, that’s my wish, Santa, so I hope you and your elves can make this happen.  (That’s Kansas, Santa, land of the South Wind, and I’ve got lots of ancestral ties to Illinois, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, too)

Dare I hope that the new Kindle-type technology that Apple and various others will soon have available might just include the capability to view this info while sitting at home or at your favorite brick and mortar library?

Dare I to dream?

If so, I may just start on my 2010 Christmas list right now….

Sherry Stocking Kline
December 11, 2009

Thanks once again to Thomas MacEntee of GeneaBloggers for today’s Advent Calendar Challenge!

December 11 – Other Traditions

Did your family or friends also celebrate other traditions during the holidays such as Hanukkah or Kwanzaa? Did your immigrant ancestors have holiday traditions form their native country which they retained or perhaps abandoned?

My Stocking ancestors came from England in the 1630’s, and while they inter-married with those of Scottish and/or Irish descent as well as Native American, whatever traditions any of them might have brought with them have been long lost, or interwoven with more recent American ones.

On my mother’s side, I’m still trying to knock down the brick wall that a man named Jones who marries a woman named Smith creates.  I’ve read in a book  that speaks about our Smith family history that we have Welsh and French on that side.

For my family, it was all about Christmas Eve…

For my family, wherever the tradition came from or whether it began with my parents, Christmas was all about Christmas Eve. We gathered together, Dad, Mom, my youngest brother (still older than myself), my oldest brother and his growing family, and we exchanged presents.  And we all knew that the presents that night came from our parents and grand-parents, not from Santa.

But the Christmas Stocking was what held the magic! It came from Santa himself!

Here is an excerpt from mountaingenealogy.blogspot.com that sounds like my experience, too!

“And we aren’t talking about the rather large, decorative stockings of today. These were literally their stockings [socks] that they wore on a daily basis.”

We didn’t have a fireplace, nor even a wood stove, so we pinned the stockings to the couch, usually the side nearest to the door, as that was where the jolly old elf was believed to come into our home!

The stockings that we hung had to be our own!

The stockings that we hung had to be our own! So the presents that we got when we were little were, well, little!

I remember getting tiny little animals that I loved to play with, and most often they were tiny little horses with cowboys and Indians to ride them and sometimes there was candy in the toe, and a barrette for my long honey-blonde braids.

And the good thing was, that as I grew, the socks grew, and the presents became bigger!

How exciting it was to ‘graduate’ from not-so-stretchy little Buster Brown cotton socks to extra stretchy (and longer) bobby socks!  Much more room for goodies!

My children used to ‘cheat’…

I continued the hanging of the Stocking’s with my children, though they were allowed to ‘cheat’ and particularly the youngest more often than not scoured the house giggling and laughing, comparing one sock to another while she hunted for the largest stretchiest stocking available, most often her Dad’s calf high athletic sock.

A good thing, that, as they sometimes found their favorite music CD all tucked in with other goodies from Santa.

by Sherry Stocking Kline
December 10, 2009

Thanks to Thomas MacEntee for today’s Christmas Advent Calendar Challenge!

Gifts

What were your favorite gifts, both to receive and to give? Are there specific gift-giving traditions among your family or ancestors?

Today’s prompt is a tie-in with the Smile for the Camera carnival at Shades of the Departed.

What were my favorite gifts?  To receive or to give? Hmmm…

There are several empty places in my family’s circle now, so my Christmas memories are tinged with sorrow as well as joy because I miss those people very much, but there were several gifts that were fun to give, and I remember some I received that gave my little heart joy!

Stick Horses and Cowboy Outfits!

After my nephews came along, most Christmases my folks bought us all something quite similar, and one Christmas when we were all little stair steps, me about seven, and them five and two, we were given the stick horses with the plastic heads and the cowboy and cowgirl outfits to go along with it!

Because we watched Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, HopAlong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger and Tonto, and the Cisco Kid on tv every week we were well-versed in the bang-bang-shoot-em-up outdoor play that included galloping all over our pasture on stick horses to  shoot the bad guys. Of course, we were the white-hatted heroes! My youngest nephew, not quite old enough to keep up, insisted on riding his  ‘horse’ head down, so his mighty steed’s head got drug all over the pasture!

The most difficult Christmas present I ever bought…

The most difficult Christmas present I ever had to buy was the first one I bought for my mom by myself after my dad passed away.  I just couldn’t figure out what to buy.  But I found a grandmother’s charm bracelet, with little boy and girl heads, with the names and birth dates engraved on the little heads.  By that time, Mom had five grandchildren and one on the way, but I remember standing in the store, feeling very lost and very alone, trying to decide between the choices.

One of the most fun presents we ever bought…

One of the most fun presents that we ever bought was for my father-in-law when our children were small. My father-in-law always hoped that someone would give his boys a train set. (I think so he could enjoy it, too!)

So my husband and I picked him out a neat little train set, and as the television commercial says the look on his face was “priceless.”  He set it up in his basement for awhile, and shared it with his grandchildren, and then a few years down the road, when he started spending more time in Texas in the winter, gave it to our children to enjoy.

A Personalized Family Photo Calendar Keeps us All Up to Date!

For the past few years, I’ve e-mailed family members to request family photographs, (whatever they want to send) though the ones where they are fishing, playing softball, and just doing fun things make great collages for the calendar that I make and give to my mom.

I try to focus on a different family group each month, and when possible, feature someone that is having a birthday that month, though in some months, there are several birthdays.

Here is this year’s calendar front, the photograph on the left was taken in 2000, before we lost my brother Gary and my sister-in-law Nancy to cancer in 2001. It shows my mom, with my two brothers standing on the left with their spouses and me on the lower right with my husband. My dad ‘s photo is inset on the right.

Harold and Dorothy Stocking Family - Standing: Gary "Sox" Stocking, Harold Frederick "Fred" Stocking, Jr., Norman L. Kline. Seated: Sharon Stocking, Dorothy Stocking Barry, Sherry Stocking Kline. Harold Frederick "Jiggs" Stocking, Sr. in oval on the right.

I usually make copies for the rest of the family, complete with all the birthdays and anniversaries.  They all love it!  It’s a great way to help us all keep up with important dates!

There are several places that offer this service…

I bought Broderbund’s calendar creator several years ago, but you can also make calendars several places on the internet, such as at my Heritage Makers’ website, and I believe that Kodak and other places also offer this service.

One good thing about making it with Calendar Creator, and at the Heritage Maker’s website, is that once you get the template set up, complete with birthdays and anniversaries, you just copy and save with a new name for next year, and re-place this year’s photographs with next year’s new ones!

Sherry Stocking Kline
December 9, 2009

When I was growing up, my Grandma Maud (McGinnis) Stocking lived an hour and a half away in a little town named Cedarvale, Kansas .  And though we went to see her and brought her to see us, it didn’t always happen exactly on Christmas.

So Grandma Stocking would pack up a little package for our family. It was all wrapped up in brown paper with packages inside for each of us, and oh, how I looked forward to that little package!

I watched for the mail man to turn the corner and drive down our little country road and when I saw him coming, I would run down the driveway of our farm to the mail box to say hello and check and see if today was THE day.

When the package came, I would run back up to the house with it and begin badgering and begging my mom to let me open it early. Most of the time, she made me wait at least until closer to Christmas. So then it was time to shake, squeeze, and guess what the package had in it.

The present I remember best is the one she made herself.

I can’t remember every present that Grandma sent, and I don’t remember anything that she sent my folks, but the present I remember best is the one she made for me herself.

It was a crayon apron.  It was a pretty pink, girl-y looking with colored braid stitched on it and stitched into  it were slim little pockets for crayons and each pocket had a colorful crayon in it. (I think there might have been a coloring book, too) It was designed to keep my clothes clean I’m sure, but I loved that little apron.

I was thrilled with it, proud of it, and I wore it and used it for many years.  Finally, one of the ties came lose, and we didn’t instantly repair it. And, I was beginning to ‘outgrow’ the tiny little apron.  For a long time, I left the crayons in the apron, and used it to organize my crayons.

I hope the little crayon apron will be there…

I’m not sure what happened to that little apron, but I hope (and pray) that when I go digging through my attic for the keepsakes I stored there many years ago that the little crayon apron will be there.

Thanks to Thomas MacEntee of  GeneaBloggers.com for today’s Advent Calendar Challenge!  Each day, reading the other blog posts and then writing my own has taken me on a “Sentimental Journey” through Christmases Past!  Fortunately, I haven’t met up with Scrooge in any of them!

Christmas Cookies

Did your family or ancestors make Christmas Cookies? How did you help? Did you have a favorite cookie?

My mom wasn’t all that big on making cookies.  I mean, she would make them, but once they were in the oven, well, they might stay there a tad too long.

And who knows,  maybe that was her subtle way to get me to take over the cookie baking once I got old enough!

No Pillsbury Dough Boy for my mom…

When I was really young, about my granddaughter’s age, somewhere from five to eight years of age, Mom was really big on making yummy sugar cookie dough (from scratch of course, no Pillsbury doughboy with his handy cookie tubes back then!) and letting us cut them out.

She did this pretty often, actually, and not always just at Christmas time.    Sometimes it was my nephews and I, ( we all being nearly of the same age) and sometimes it was with my friends and classmates.

We would dive in, flour on the table, flour on our noses and hands, (and sometimes on the floor!) and share the rolling pins and the cookie cutters.

We had so many cookie cutters that they filled up a shoe box. There were Christmas trees and reindeer, Christmas stars, and little lambs and cows. We had round ones, and diamond shaped ones, and little Porky Pig ones. (Geeminy, wonder where those all are?) Time to go on a treasure hunt!

We were always on the scout for new cookie cutters and we usually brought a few new ones home each Christmas.

Shortly after I married I began to host my own sugar cookie party for my little niece. The first year, she was probably only three or four, and I think we only got two or three cookies baked in one piece that first year!

Did I mention that we always had to double (or triple) the recipe to make sure at least some of the cookies got baked instead of eaten in dough form.  (That was before we knew that all kinds of illnesses resulted from eating raw eggs in cookie dough) What a devastating discovery that was!

Sherry Stocking Kline
December 8th, 2009

Salinda (Rose) Breneman, daughter of Eden and Elsie/Elcy Rose, is my great-grandmother on my mother’s side.

Looking at this photo today, I wish I’d been better prepared to take tombstone photos. I should have had a soft whisk brush with me, a cloth, something to carry water to the stones, and perhaps even a tiny rake, or grass shears in some places.

Shown on the Stone:

Mother
Salinda E. Breneman
1855 – 1936

Great-grandmother Salinda is buried in the Milan Cemetery, Ryan Township, Sumner County, Kansas. The cemetery is about 12 miles west of Wellington, KS on Highway 160.

She is shown with her parents and siblings on the 1860 census when she is just 7 years old.

1860 Census 4 July 1860
Grand View Township, Louisa County, Iowa

Family 344  – 342

Edan Rose  – 34 – M – Farm Labour

Elcy Rose  –  32 – F

Abram (Abraham?)  – 13 – M

Salinda – 7 – F

Absalom – 3 – M

Salinda Rose Breneman

Salinda Rose Breneman is the mother of Ira, Albert, Harvey, and Otto, Carrie and May. You can see photos of her children as well as a photograph of Albert’s tombstone here.

Salinda was married to Constantine “Tom” Breneman, but they divorced later in life.

If you’ve done a family search for the Breneman or Rose families, and landed on this page, I hope you will leave a comment and contact info so we can share our research!