Celebration Sunday - Photos for a Cousin

This week I was finally able to sort through the last of the photos found in my step-mother's basement last September. In doing so, I was able to give a cousin the first glimpse of her second great-grandmother, Laura Scharer Matthews. Laura Scharer was married to William G. Matthews, the eldest son of my great-grandfather, Arthur William Matthews, and his first wife.

Thank goodness the person who sent these photos to my grandfather (possibly one of Laura and William's daughters) wrote on the backs or I never would have known who was in them!

Laura Scharer Matthews (rt) and
her granddauther Betty Haynes (lt)

Laura Schaerer Matthews (lt)
and Betty Haynes (rt)

 It is such a gift to be able to give these photos to my cousin! She was very excited to hear I had them and to see the scans and I'll be mailing out the originals to her tomorrow. Happy Dance!

Celebration Sunday - Two Matthews Surprises

I had two very nice moments this week, both related to my genealogy although they weren't exactly finds. Thanks to Cheri Hudson Passey, though, I am remembering to be grateful for these moments and celebrate them.

Earlier this week I noticed a new comment left here on a recent post by a woman who is not a cousin. I'm not even sure of her name because she didn't leave any contact info. But I did share her comment with friends and family as excitedly as if she had been a cousin. Her comment related to an old post where she had seen a familiar name.

Image from New York Public Library's Digital Collection
Citation Below

I spent many Mondays last year transcribing my grandfather Matthews' story in twenty some Amanuensis Monday posts. He had written about three fortuitous happenings in his life that sent it on its eventual course. Forced to leave high school and take a job after his father's death, my grandfather decided to take an underground job in a local coal mine because those underground jobs paid better. After a gas explosion and later a roof collapse that they both survived, Malachi Glennon, one of my grandfather's supervisors, advised my grandfather to get out of the mines, before he was "kilt". My grandfather felt and I agree that Malachi's advice, and my grandfather's decision to act on it, were some of the best things that ever happened to him.

The great-granddaughter of Malachi's brother left the lovely comment on my blog last week, grateful for those little details of the time my grandfather and Malachi worked together and the story of Malachi's influence on my grandfather's life.

It is those lovely details, the ones that flesh out someone we never knew in life, that make them come to life for us. Being able to provide that for someone just made my day.

The second bit of excitement was also related to my grandfather Matthews. Two years ago or so I stumbled across an image of him while doing a random Google search. He spent four years at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and I had stumbled on an image from the University's archives. It showed my grandfather presenting the Institute's 500,000th visitor with a 1,500-year-old oil lamp. A nice find. You can see it here.

I follow the Institute on Facebook and logged-on yesterday during a break at work. There at the top of my feed was the same image posted by them for ThrowBack Thursday! It was a very cool moment, even if I had seen the image before.

No brick walls were broken through this week, no new family artifacts were discovered, no new record sets provided new insights, but these two things made it a very cool week.

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Image from The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Conveyer line for carrying bird's-eye coal to bin, Scranton, Pa., U.S.A." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1905. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-a796-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Celebration Sunday - Benjamin Smith connected to Rockville Centre

Standing: Orlando C, Charlotte Fisk, William Henry & George R Smith
Seated: Benjamin, Emma Edwards and MaryAnn Codner Smith

I started my happy dance early Tuesday evening. I was taking a quick minute to review some hints in my tree on Ancestry in anticipation of the fact that I will probably have to suspend my membership for a few months. I've been focusing just on hints for my direct ancestors but a passport application for a my maternal grandfather's uncle caught my eye for some reason. I opted to review the hint and then clicked on the link, just as I did, I thought I saw something in the index that said Rockville Center, NY. The link took tenths of a second to open, but it felt like forever...

Now, by the way of background I should explain why that would matter. Back when I was in very early days of researching my family I discovered that my maternal grandfather's paternal grandfather, Benjamin Smith, was born in Hempstead, NY. This was a big deal because we did not have any familial connection to Long Island that we knew of before we read his obituary. We moved here in the 70s so that my father could attend Adelphi University, not because we had any family here. That is where the name of my blog comes from, the feeling that I had tripped over my roots. 1820s Long Island was lousy with Smiths. Not only that it was lousy with Benjamin Smiths. Ugh! I knew that one of those families were the founders of the village where we settled on moving to Long Island, and were I still live, Rockville Centre, founded by John "Rock" Smith.

I've thought it would be very funny and pretty cool if we turned out to be related to the Rock Smiths, but Benjamin is a brick wall ancestor. I haven't been able to learn anything about him before his marriage except for those few tidbits from his obituary. Until now.

On his son's passport application he states that this father, Benjamin Smith, was born in Rockville Center, L.I., N.Y.

Now I've been at this long enough to know that the passport application of a son, completed 12 years after the passing of the father isn't proof of any of this, but it really is an intriguing clue and one I hope to have the time to work on soon!

Happy Easter

Celebration Sunday is a blogging prompt from Cheri Hudson Passey of Carolina Girl Genealogy.  This is a place to celebrate finding anything new in your research. So if you have a find to celebrate, write a Celebration Sunday post and share the link in the comments of Cheri's weekly post.