Author: handicraftsowl

Do You Have Any Infamous Relatives?

My Abbott ancestors were Puritans who immigrated with their families from England on the ship Arabella, arriving in Massachusetts in about 1637. My 10th Great-Grandparents, George and Hannah Chandler Abbott were among the twenty founding families of Andover, which is about 15 miles from Salem. Being so near Salem, Andover was not immune from the witch mania that was so prevalent at the time.

Martha Carrier, another Andover resident, was a social pariah. She was outspoken and gruff with her neighbors, and conceived her first child out of wedlock, giving birth to him within 2 months of her marriage to her husband, Thomas Carrier. Benjamin Abbott was the brother of my 9th Great-Grandfather, who was also named George. In 1692, when Benjamin was 31 years old, he accused Martha of witchcraft. She was the first accused witch in Andover.

Benjamin and Martha were having a disagreement about the border between their properties and he claimed she had cursed him when he became afflicted with several ailments, including a swollen foot and sores on his side and groin, that could not be cured by the local doctor. Benjamin’s wife, Sarah, also claimed that some of their cattle had been bewitched by Martha. Several young women, known as the “Salem Girls”, were among Martha’s accusers.

Martha was arrested on 28 May 1692 and taken to prison in Salem Village. Reverend Cotton Mather was a key figure during her trial, and though she maintained her innocence, she was found guilty and executed by hanging on 19 August 1692.

In 1711, the Massachusetts government apologized to Thomas Carrier for hanging his wife and reversed the convictions. There is a memorial to the people who were victims of the Salem Witch Trials in a downtown park in Salem.

The Heretic’s Daughter is a book written by one of Martha Carrier’s descendants. It is written from the point of view of Martha’s daughter, Sarah, who had been accused of witchcraft along with her mother but survives the Salem Witch Trials.

Martha was not well liked by the residents of Andover, but she did not deserve to be hung because of it. Though my 9th Great-Granduncle Benjamin was just one of her accusers, I consider him an infamous relative for the part he played in her death.

Do You Have Any Famous Relatives?

I am obsessed with researching my family tree and finding out about my ancestors and distant cousins. It really makes history come alive to think about family living through the historical events. When I first started researching my family tree, I didn’t know much more than my immediate family. The LDS church has a free resource for researching your family tree and you don’t need to be a member to use it. You can visit the Family Search website to get started.

Have you ever wondered if you are related to anyone famous? Family Search has a tool to see if you are related to any famous people. You could be related to presidents, inventors and scientists, or entertainers and artists. Of course you could also be related to LDS church leaders or pioneers.

Reverend John Robinson is my 11th Great-Grandfather. He was born about 1575 in Nottinghamshire, England and was the minister of the Puritans who fled to the Netherlands to avoid religious persecution in England. Though he did not join them on this momentous trip, a group of 35 of his congregants became the Pilgrims who travelled on the Mayflower to Plymouth Colony. John died before he could leave the Netherlands, but his son, Isaac, my 10th Great-Grandfather, joined the Pilgrims in Plymouth in 1631.

Going back much further, my 24th Great-Grandfather was King Henry III of England, though I am descended from his second son, Edmund “Crouchback”, who was the 1st Earl of Lancaster. Edmund’s older brother, Edward “Longshanks” was the King of England during the reign of the Scottish King Robert I, known as Robert the Bruce. Incidentally, I am descended from Robert’s sister Mary Bruce, who is my 20th Great-Grandmother.

I am also distant cousins to author, Samuel Clemens, aka. Mark Twain, and the beautiful actress, Lucille Ball.

Which Games Did You Play as a Child?

I have always liked playing a variety of games. I was born before video games were invented, so I started out playing the classics like Checkers, Chinese Checkers, Dominoes, Jax, Pick-up Stix, Tiddly Winks, and Yahtzee.

Our family played a lot of board games, too, like Clue, The Game of Life, Monopoly, Operation, Parcheesi, and Scrabble.

When I was younger, I played easy card games like Go Fish, Old Maid and War, but as I got older, I moved up to card games such as Crazy-8s, Rummy, Skip-Bo, Solitaire, and Uno.

While in school, during recess with my friends, we would jump rope and uses rhymes to count how many times we jumped without missing.

We also did a lot of hand clapping games with rhymes like “Say Say, Oh Playmate” and “Miss Mary Mack”.

The first “video game”, Pong, came out when I was in elementary school. It was a simple game console that connected to your TV and had two knobs you turned to control the paddles that would hit the square ball back across the screen to your opponent. I remember my siblings and I would get in trouble for hogging the TV while playing it. Not long after that, arcades starting popping up at malls everywhere and you could find many other games to play for a quarter. I played games like Asteroids, Defender, Donkey Kong, Joust, Space Invaders, and Pac Man.

Later, we got the Atari Video Computer System and could play all those cool games at home. Our grandparents got smart, though, and put a second TV in the family room so they could actually watch theirs again.

When I was a senior in high school, we got a Commodore 64 computer and I discovered the popular interactive fiction games published by Infocom. These were text adventure games without graphics. The game would provide a description of your location and you typed what you wanted your character to do. Each game could be different, depending on which choices you made. Of the ones shown above, my favorites were The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was based on the book by Douglas Adams, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which was a story that started out in a bar in Upper Sandusky, Ohio in 1936. You got to choose which gender your character was by which restroom you went into, and you could choose your level of naughtiness, either tame or lewd. I actually have the entire set of Infocom games on 3 1/2 in floppy discs, though I haven’t powered up that old desktop computer in so long, I’m not even sure if it would work.

Complete the “Year You Were Born” Activity

This assignment is easy. Just do some research and share some interesting facts from the year you were born. Share things like historical events, TV Shows, movies, books, songs, who won different sporting events, anything really. Here is a compilation of people, places and things that happened in 1967, the year I was born.

Lyndon Baynes Johnson, often referred to by his initials LBJ, was originally the vice president under President John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963, but was sworn in as president after Kennedy’s assassination. He was then re-elected and served until 1969.

In 1967, the world population was about 3.5 billion, while the US population was about 197 thousand.

One of the worst tragedies in the history of spaceflight occurred on January 27, 1967 when the crew of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed in a fire in the Apollo Command Module during a preflight test at Cape Canaveral. 

Despite the Apollo tragedy, NASA launched the Saturn V rocket for the first time on November 8, 1967.

This is the original brochure from 1967 for this cute little house in Grandview, MO that could originally be had for $16,300. The same family lived in it for 54 years, never modified it and sold it in 2021 for $158,000.

Minimum wage was $1.40 per hour. A gallon of gas was 33 cents. Coca-Cola has been around since 1886 and for 73 years, until 1959, the price of a bottle of Coke was set at 5 cents, but by 1967 it had gone up to 29 cents. The Ford Mustang Hardtop retailed for $2,592, the Fastback retailed for $2,692, and the Convertible retailed for $2,698. You could buy your family a dozen eggs for 33 cents, three boxes of Kellogg’s cereal for $1 and six cans of frozen orange juice concentrate for another $1. Then for dinner, you could get some Swanson’s TV dinners for 39 cents each and have frozen chocolate pie for 25 cents.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles and Daydream Believer by The Monkees were both released in 1967. I remember watching The Monkees TV show in syndication as a teenager and had a huge crush on Davy Jones (what teenage girl didn’t?), but it originally came out in 1966 and ran for only two seasons.

Native New Yorker and aspiring journalist, Jann Wenner, released the first issue of Rolling Stone Magazine on November 9, 1967. It featured John Lennon on the cover and had stories about Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Pink Floyd.

A Man for All Seasons won 6 Academy Awards that year and Elizabeth Taylor won Best Actress for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. A movie ticket cost $1.25, or four people could go to a drive-in for $2.00 per car.

Write an Autobiopoem

OK, well I kind of feel like I’m cheating because I already posted an Autobiopoem. But, incase you missed it, here’s what they are. They are sort of mini-autobiographies written in 11 lines. They don’t have to rhyme, but they should follow this simple pattern:

1. First name
2. Four descriptive traits
3. Son/Daughter of…
4. Lover of (3 items)
5. Who feels (3 items)
6. Who needs (3 items)
7. Who gives (3 items)
8. Who fears (3 items)
9. Who would like to see
10. Resident of
11. Last name

Tell the Story Behind Your Name. Are There Any Naming Traditions in Your Family?

We do have a naming tradition in our family. Instead of naming the children directly after someone else, we take their initials and choose names that start with those letters. My Dad was Dennis Michael and I am Deborah Michelle. Sometimes we use the same middle name. My Mom was Beverly Jo and my sister is Brandy Jo. My son’s Dad is Charles Allen, so my son is Corey Allen and my daughter, Daina Michelle, has my initials. And it has been carried into the next generation with my Grandson, Dalton Michael. It’s a nice way to honor a family member without having generations of people with the exact same name.

Start Filling in Your Family Tree Chart.

The basic family tree chart includes the names, dates, and places associated with a person’s birth, marriage, and death. It then includes that same information for the parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, of the main person on the chart. These charts are available online for free, or you can sign up for websites such as Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, or Genealogy.com. Some sites require a subscription while others may be free. These sites are also searchable and will help you grow the branches of your tree over time. Gone are the days of needing to visit the state where the events actually happened just to get a copy of the certificate.

The first thing you do when filling out your chart is to start with yourself and fill in what you know. Be careful to be as accurate as possible, or you could end up researching an entirely wrong branch and wasting a lot of time. Get copies of as many of the birth, death, and marriage certificates as you can. Vitalchek has links to order vital records for all 50 states. Be aware, if the person is living, you may not be authorized a copy.

If you are lucky enough to have a connection to royalty, they keep very good records of their pedigrees. I am directly descended from Henry Plantagenet, aka. King Henry III of England. He is my 24th great-grandfather. My 23rd great-grandfather was his second surviving son Edmund (the one who did not become king), who was nicknamed Edmund Crouchback. Edmund never became king, but he did fight in the crusades.