Quick update

Sorry for the lack of recent updates. I have spent the last few weeks trying to index all the names in the cemeteries I have done. I have one cemetery I haven't posted on the cemetery site yet... I haven't had the time to work on it. Once I finish indexing I will work on it. I am hoping in the coming weeks to be able to go down and take some more pictures. The season for haunting cemeteries is coming to an end. At least for the family cemeteries you have to hike to. Church ones should be ok. I'm not a big fan of snakes and ticks so unless I can shower in Off and have a way to scare snakes you won't find me in the woods. 

Mecklenburg County, Virginia Cemeteries

For the last two months I have been working on a new project. A site dedicated to the cemeteries of Mecklenburg County, Virginia. I will have every cemetery listed on there, complete with pictures, GPS coordinates and any other information I can provide. It will be like the Brunswick County site done by John Pritchett. Right now I only have four churches from around the Bracey area listed and two private family cemeteries. I am hoping that next week I will be able to get more. It takes time to resize pictures, type up all the names and dates and index everything. I need to get the word out soon about the site so I can get peoples help in finding family cemeteries. The hardest part for me will be calling people to ask if they have a cemeteries on their land. I am not very good with talking to strangers on the phone. Or in person.

I can only imagine how many years this project will take given the size of Mecklenburg.

Winter is the best time to go looking for cemeteries. No snakes. I had thought that I would start off doing all of the church cemeteries then once they were all done I would go and find family cemeteries but then it came to me... church cemeteries are looked after far more than most private ones so it would be best to go to them in the warmer months and visit private family ones in the winter when I may have to walk through fields to get to them. 

I am also building a site for Mecklenburg County history and genealogy. I haven't had much time to work on it since I was concentrating on the cemetery site. I haven't completely decided what is to be on the site. I do know that some of the content on St. Tammany Farm will be moved over to there. Also I want to provide information to help others start or continue their research on their Mecklenburg families. I was also thinking about hosting genealogies done by others on families from Mecklenburg. I will post more on the site as I work on it and have a better idea of what the site will be about and what will be available on it. 

new Photo Album

Over the weekend I created a new photo album to show the pictures on St. Tammany Farm. The old way made it very hard for me to add new pictures without a lot of reworking old pages. I hope everyone likes it.

St Tammany Farm Photo Album

Martha Alevia Jones, Annie Riddick Bracey and Maude Louisa Bracey

This past weekend I was rescanning some tintype pictures, I noticed that one of them had some writing very faintly written on the back. With closer inspection under the light I saw it read Annie Bracey. 

Along with this photo was a tintype of her sister Maude, only that one was marked more clearly so I knew before it was Maude. I also spent last weekend scanning other tintype pictures we had only they were in frames. One picture in particular stood out. It had been on a small table in the hall for some months next to a picture of Viola May Bracey. No one can remember how it came to be on the table. I scanned it and noticed that the little girl in the picture looks very much like the picture of Maude from when she was a little girl. I compared them side by side and had my mother and aunt also look and they both came to the same conclusion, it was Maude in that picture....which ment that the woman in the picture with her was Martha Alevia Jones, her mother. This is the first picture we've ever seen of the first Miss Pattie. (Mont's first wife) so you can imagine we were very excited. 

I have posted the new pictures in the Bracey Photo Album.

Updates coming soon

I am currently in the middle of a job so I don't have time to update. But I do have some new information to share so keep checking back for updates. 

1864 Confederate Engineers map

Here is the picture of 1864 overlay. It gives you a good idea of where everyone was in 1864 and what is there today. I tried to scale it to the two places I knew about so everything else should be about the right place....give or take a few hundred feet lol. 

A milestone!

A few months ago I got Family Tree Maker 2008 and started inputting all of the Bracey family I had. Well yesterday I reached a milestone. I got to 2000 people! Right now I have 2074 names on my tree. And I know of a few more I could put in. If I were to have one large file with all of my family I'd have over 4000 names I'm sure. But can you imagine how long it would take for the file to open or save?

Sorry it has taken me so long to update this... Not much has happened in the research world. Haven't been able to get to the library in over two months. So all I've been able to do is online and go through papers I have here. Later I'm going to post a picture I copyed from Google Earth. I overlayed a 1864 Confederate engineers map over the part of Mecklenburg Co. my farm is located. It isn't a perfect match but its just about. It helps with finding out where everyone was in 1864 in todays terms. What I want to do next is find old Plats from people selling their lands and overlay them to tract the owners of the land. But right now I only have a few plats here. I will have to try and find some at the library next time I'm able to go.

Doll

A few weeks ago I was going through some papers and found a "transcription" of sorts my mother wrote on one of the tapes my grampa did. I dug out the tape and listened to it and he talks about his uncle Doll. Well it turns out he was going through a photo album and talking about the different pictures inside. One of them was of Adolphus Bracey! I about died. I have been looking for a picture of Doll for years. Turns out my aunt had the album at her house and this weekend I got it and have scanned the photo. Its a picture of the picture, don't know who owns the original one sadly. Very lucky person who does. I have already loaded the photo onto the site. It's in the Bracey Photo Album as well as with his genealogy.

Now the only photos of Paschal's children I'm missing now are of Virginius and Viola. But I don't think I will have much luck in finding pictures of them. I'm also missing a photo of Mont's daughter, Lelia.

Remodel

I decided to remodel the Photo Album pages of my site. And I think I'm just about done. Added alot more of the Bracey family, as well as some more Lambert's. Also added a new album. It has photos found with the Bracey family photos but they are unknown. Some were marked but none of the names fit anyone I know.

Thomas Harrison Bracey

For years there has been an old ledger in a box in my house. Never really noticed it until I started working on this site again. Well, a while ago I was going through the ledger and noticed a few names I recognized. Thomas R. Hendrick, father of Nannie Hendrick, wife of Alvis Orville Bracey, Sr., and Thomas Harrison Bracey, son of Samuel Bracey of Brunswick County. The ledger is from 1885 and is a record of births and deaths in the South Hill district of Mecklenburg County. It doesn’t have all the births and deaths, I’m sure of that; it isn’t large enough. But yesterday I was looking at it again and was looking around the Internet, and I realized that I couldn’t find Thomas Harrison Bracey’s death date anywhere. Ancestry.com doesn’t seem to have it or Ed Dunn’s site. I believe this ledger is probably a copy of the information that was sent to the state and presumably it is the same as Bureau of Vital Statistics records.

Interestingly enough, it seems that Harrison Hyram Bracey died the same year as Thomas Harrison Bracey.

I now have a Family Tree on Ancestry.com so more people can see the information on the tree, since not a lot of people have found my site yet. And I have now added Thomas Bracey’s death to it.