...and I helped!

Debbie's changing from teaching 5th grade language arts at West Fannin (now Elementary, but formerly the High School for this end of the county...where I graduated in 1970) to teaching 6th grade reading at Fannin Middle next fall.
This means packing up all her personal stuff from her large room and moving it--not to her new room, where they will put any and all items from the room out in the hall over the summer while they wax the floors--but to our LIVING ROOM. I hope to get the storage building fixed in the next few days...I know now what will go into storage first!
I've been lifting boxes of 'light' reading books and other stuff today, so I'm sore. Tomorrow the copy machine, shelves, desk, chair, other chair, file cabinet. old desk, oak runners from the old desk, etc. etc. etc. And also I have to pick up our new refrigerator and get it installed, plus meet with some folks coming from Mississippi about a mission trip this summer.
Just how did my life get so complicated?
And in a strange coincidence, the lady whose room Debbie will move to this fall is one of my former youth from FBC Ellijay 35 years ago. And she married a guy I went to High School and couple of years of college with!

Busy Week/35th anniversary

Last week Matthew finally got graduated from college, I got the roof decking and felt paper on the roof of my building (YAY!) with the help of Kevin and Jan O'Quinn, we had the annual meeting of the Fannin County Historical Foundation (on the excursion train, no less!) and also did all the usual stuff of work, Debbie's school, etc. I'm looking forward to our trip Wednesday night to see the Braves and spend Thursday hanging around Atlanta celebrating our 35th anniversary.

Spring flowers

Our red honeysuckle that's moved with us for the last 5 moves has just begun its annual display--we expect lots of hummingbirds any day. And the new yellow honeysuckle on the other side of the trellis is also starting. Not only that, the old-fashioned snowball bush didn't get 'nipped' by frost this year and is putting on a spectacular display. Enjoy!

Freaky things on my birthday...

I went to the History Channel today and looked at 'this day in history'--some strange stuff happened on April 29th:
>Hitler and Eva Braun married in 1945 (and killed themselves the next day). US soldiers liberated Dachau the same day--one of my old Sunday School teachers was with the 101st Airborne who liberated one of the camps, and who invaded Bertesgarden, Bavaria--Hitler's 'Eagle's nest'
>>Joan of Arc came to the relief of Orleans
>>>New Orleans fell to Union forces during 'the late unpleasantness'
>>>>1951, Dale Earnhart was born. Different years, Emperor Hirohito and poet Rod McKuen were born
>>>>>1974 Nixon released the tapes that brought him down
>>>>>>First joint US/Russia spacewalk (1990s I think)
Found out that on the day I was born, some congressman in Washington dropped dead in his office.
Like I said, freaky stuff!

Easter and family

We had a great Easter morning at church. At first it looked like there would be a tiny crowd, but they poured in at the last minute to enjoy the music of the Watkins family (acoustic gospel bluegrass).
Jim and Bonnie (our daughter-in-law Tasha's folks, and our good friends) hosted us for lunch and a birthday celebration for Debbie. I won't double-post the photo albums, but if you're on Facebook you can go to my facebook page and look at them...also some cool shots we took on a trip to the Atlanta History Center last week.

More Old Family Information

Wow, when you finally get a breakthrough on your family ancestry search, you can jump to a lot of new information quickly...
Just found out today that William Jones, my distant ancestor who emigrated from Shropshire, England to Virginia before eventually moving to South Carolina, also served in the Patriot forces during the Revolution.
I suspected that a Thomas Jones who fought in the Revolution was a son of William's, and that Thomas was an older brother of Solomon Jones, my ancestor born in 1774. Another ancestor, Nimrod Cross, gave a deposition about Thomas Jones' Revolutionary service so Thomas' ancient widow could get a congressional pension in the 1830s.
Anyway, I'm now eagerly trying to get in touch with a distant, distant cousin who's written a book about our Jones family. Of course I doubt that she has many of the Georgia Joneses in the book, but what I want is information about the ones 'way back there.'
And it looks as if we'll have a Jones family reunion this September or October in Forsyth County at Harmony Grove Baptist.
More when I learn more...

Parts of the chart...

These are jpg files taken from a scan of printouts of the pdf file of a MS Publisher file of my family chart I've been working on! In the last few days, I've jumped back over 200 years in tracing my family...pretty good for a guy that was stuck for roughly 20 years on "John Jones!"

If you click on each image, blogger opens the file in some kind of image deal that will let you see them in more detail. I have pages 1, 2, and 17-19 of the total of 20 pages in the big file. This was more or less an experiment!