Happy 100th Birthday, Grace!

This post originally appeared on my website, The Kaintuckeean. The Centenarian is my wife's grandmother. 

Grace Sammons Brammell
100 Years Young

On February 16, 1913, Grace Sammons was born to William Franklin Sammons and Millie (Rucker) Sammons in Johns Run, Carter County, Kentucky. Over the weekend, Grace's family and friends gathered in Grayson to celebrate her 100th birthday.

For several hours, Grace "held court" as well-wishers came and greeted the centenarian and life-long Carter Countian. During the celebration, Grayson mayor George Steele gave Grace a key to the city. He also read a proclamation of the city council which declared February 16, 2013 as "Grace Brammell Day" in the city of Grayson. Senator Robin Webb moved the Kentucky State Senate to recognize Grace "upon the auspicious occasion of her 100th birthday."  Governor Steve Beshear commissioned Grace Brammell to the Honorable Order of the Kentucky Colonel. And President and First Lady sent their greetings from The White House.

Filling in the Branches

Having filled in a number of branches on ancestry.com and found many new leads and extensions, I wanted to begin sharing in permanent form some history here. 

I've created two pages - Brackney and Styer - for the lineages of my paternal grandparents' surnames. I hope to continue this process with more of the branches as this is the easiest way to present information to those not on ancestry.com. It also provides a way to tell the story of our ancestors. I hope you enjoy and, if you are family and have updates, do share!

The Boone-Haworth Connection

The following originally appeared on my Kaintuckeean blog.

My old genealogy website logo, ca. 1997

brackney.tripod.com

Although this blog is committed to Kentucky's history, I've recently returned to another historical addiction: genealogy. When I was in my early teens, I was interested in genealogy. A research trip to Salt Lake City strengthened a passion that has gone dormant since 1997.

About a month ago -- likely in response to watching a few episodes of NBC's now-cancelled Who Do You Think You Are? -- my genealogical interests were rekindled. I've found two banker boxes of old research notes which I've thumbed through again for the first time in fifteen years. I've also found a few interesting leads which relate to Kentucky's history. The following text describes events that occurred when Daniel Boone led a company of settlers toward Kentucky in the fall of 1773. During this trip, Indians attacked the company while it was still in Virginia killing, among others, Boone's eldest son James:

Getting Started (again)

After a fifteen year hiatus, I've returned to researching genealogy! At this point, I'm trying to delve through a couple of banker boxes which I've recently uncovered at my parents' home. I remember some of the research, the research trip to Salt Lake City, and some of the research volumes I acquired.

Looking back, I see of how little value some of them were. Today - after fifteen years - a few are quite comical. Take, for example, Genealogy Via the Internet: Tracing Your Family Roots Quickly and Easily : Computerized Genealogy in Plain English, which is a 192-page explanation on the advances in genealogical research in the (ahem) Internet era. Remarkably, the book is still in print. The following excerpt is comically illustrative:

For a Windows 95 computer, don't even turn it on unless you have a minimum of 16 megabytes [RAM], with  24 or 32 megabytes being more preferable. Memory's cheap now and the simple upgrade of adding more RAM yields dramatic dividends.

Fortunately, for those not advanced enough to have a Windows 95 machine, the author suggests a minimum of 8MB RAM for those running Windows 3.1.

Of course, aside from the incredible technological advances that have occurred in the past fifteen years I'm sure that I'll be able to uncover some research advancements as well. Fingers crossed.