Ketton Circular

Barry led this walk, and Gordon, Eddie and I followed. Just over 8 miles, fine weather, apart from a few spots of the wet stuff, and relatively dry underfoot for a change.





We set off from Ketton, parking near the phone box, in a lay-by beside the A6121.







We turned left, following the Macmillan Way, past Hibbins House, once the home of a family of stone and memorial masons. The house has several carved decorations.

We walked along the Green, turned right at Manor Green and on past the Coach House to where the path led along a grassy lane and eventually on to a quarry track with a wide bridge above the moonscape of the quarry - used for extracting limestone which is used in the local cement.





The track is pretty clear, and we followed the joint MacMillan Way/Hereward Way northwest for a couple of miles, across various arable fields. There's a lot of rapeseed at the moment. We turned to the north near a minor road, and followed the path across the A606 and downhill. Empingham church can be seen to the left.





Towards the bottom of the slope a path crosses the main route, and we took a right turn, up to a stile in the hedge and then across a couple of fields. There was a horse near Shacklewell Cottage, and we found a reasonable spot for our snack break.

Barry and friend

The path took us back up to the A6121. We walked alongside this on a wide verge for about a third of a mile, before crossing over and taking the footpath to the right. When we emerged on to another wider track we turned right, and then left, at Shacklewell Spinney. The path took us back to the Macmillan/Hereward Way, where we turned left and retraced our steps for a mile or so into Ketton.







Ketton Quarry Wildlife Reserve

SSSI



For future reference a wander through the Wildlife Reserve could be added on to future walks from Ketton.

White Faced Calf

I found this little white faced calf while out on the desert. He posed for me so I took his photo. There was even a cholla cactus skeleton by him and a tiny cholla by it with one purple blossom.

Porkypine Canyon

On this day we decided to go to a place we hadn't been to for about five years, Porkypine Canyon, or that is what we call it as the first time we went there we saw a porkypine. This was about 25 years ago. Porkypine was wattling along down the road but when it saw us it went up into the rocks. I don't think it was the rocks I took so many photos of this day but a simular bunch that I didn't get a photo of. I really like this jumble of rocks with an almost square rock sticking up like a giant childs lego block. It was squared off so well it looked like it had been done by a giant machine. We didn't find any porkpines this day but did see a lot of fresh deer and elk tracks.

Honeybee on a Coneflower

A honeybee pollinates a white coneflower in front of the Bouchon Restaurant in Yountville, California.

The Harold Angel

I belong to a sentimental kind of family - the kind that remembers loved-and-lost people, that revels in sharing images in old photos, in old home movies and on video, the kind of family that not only emails candid photos to each other on birthdays and anniversaries, but also has the birthdays & anniversaries of departed relatives marked on their current calendars.

Sometimes we remember those we loved by raising a glass to toast their memories. Sometimes we remember them in .... the kitchen. Does anyone else connect certain relatives with their favorite foods? We do! Oral history tells us that Grandma Kitty loved kidney stew, horseradish and coconut macaroons, Grandpa Jim ate a whole raw onion every night before dinner, Uncle George was a broccoli fan and the key to Uncle Ollie's heart was a big dish of stuffed peppers.

Beloved Uncle Harold's favorite pie was mince - so his wife, my piano-playing Aunt Helen, made sure that a mincemeat pie was always included in the holiday desserts - a choice that was soundly rejected by the kids in my generation. Luckily for us, Harold's other favorite pie was banana cream - one we were happy to share. His December birthday plus St Nicholas Day plus Christmas also confused us into thinking that Herald Angels were Harold Angels.... not too far off the truth! He died a long time ago, but some years I find myself making a banana cream pie on my uncle's birthday and thinking about him.

Harold grew up in Chicago, second son in a big family. His dad had a furniture finishing shop where Harold learned to like making furniture as a hobby... as a young man he worked in the office of a big furniture company, falling like a rock once he saw my cute little aunt -the feeling was mutual. Harold's generosity and courtesy soon made the whole family love him. A few years after they were married, the Second World War separated them, and Harold served with the Army Air Corps (forerunner of the US Air Force) in the Mariana Islands where he worked on the cameras of reconnaissance planes. He contracted malaria, returning to the US many months after the war ended.

With no children of their own, Helen & Harold shared love and worldly goods with the children of their brothers and sisters. They were wonderful godparents! Harold bought a 16mm home movie camera to record family parties and the antics of the youngsters... and this attention made more than two dozen nieces and nephews feel special, and as time went on it was hilarious to watch ourselves grow up when the projector came out for movie shows. We saw Helen and Harold at least once a week when we were growing up, but he was usually behind the camera - not in front of it, so we don't have enough photos of him.

Aunt Helen and Uncle Harold hosted family picnics at their small, perfect cottage on a large lot - with landscaping that he designed, planted and maintained - even letting a small, flower-loving niece believe she was helping.Harold's post-war work was in textbook publishing - and that lead to a perk for us! The display books from the office were nicely bound outside but with blank pages inside. They were replaced periodically and he passed along the outdated models. Having real books in which to draw & write our thoughts let us pretend we were real writers and artists.
Helen's piano was replaced by a Hammond Organ - she delighted in leading family singalongs. Once the group stopped singing and began talking, Harold would take a turn on the bench - coaxing a different set of melodies from the keys as background music for the conversation. How I wish for a recording of even one song!


The old camera was replaced around the time the older nieces and nephews traded dolls and baseball bats for mortar boards and bridal veils - now Uncle Harold was ready to film the great-nieces and great-nephews , traveling to see the younger generations as they set up housekeeping in distant suburbs and other states. There's the camera in his hand below - outside our rickety student dwelling. They drove 1000 miles to see us, and acted as if they were visiting a palace instead of a dump, complimenting our newlywed culinary experiments as if they were dining in a fine restaurant. That's the kind of gentleman he was.
Harold died too young - long before retirement age - breaking the hearts of all he left behind. Many years later as we ring in .., gone is not forgotten... in this Christmas season, you are still our Harold Angel!

More Balloons

Happy Dance Moments :: Making Connections

When I selected the topic of "The Happy Dance. The Joy of Genealogy." for this edition of the Carnival of Genealogy, I did so thinking it would be an easy topic for me to write about. But here it is, just a few hours before the deadline, and I'm still not sure what I'm going to write! The problem is that it really doesn't take much for me to do the "happy dance" and in 25+ years of research, I'm pleased to say, there have been quite a few of those joyous moments. Sure, there have been some disappointments too, but it's the moments of unadulterated joy that make it all worthwhile.

In the early years of research, after manually cranking through rolls of microfilm for hours on end, finding an ancestor in the census records was just cause for a mini-celebration. Most of the time the celebrations were quiet ones with my brain shouting out with joy, but not a peep escaping from my mouth. After all I was in a library. Occasionally though, I just couldn't help myself and the little squeal of delight would also bring smiles to the faces of other researchers who were also cranking the microfilm readers.

Okay, I see a "theme" developing in the random thoughts I just wrote down, so I've decided that the happy-dance moments I'm going to share will be some of those that involved making connections (kinexxions) with distant relatives and the results of those incredible experiences. These are just a few such moments.

In the spring of 1984, I began my quest to find the descendants of my 2nd great-grandparents Jacob and Louisa (Fisher) Phend by writing lots and lots of letters to anyone with the surname Phend. As replies came back, they led to more letter writing with those contacts leading to even more contacts and information. And photographs. And documents. Virtually every reply brought on a mini-celebration. But a major celebration in the journey to publish a book came about on August 18, 1985 when the first reunion since 1942 was held that included descendants from nearly all of the children of Jacob and Louisa.

I can't even begin to describe the feelings of joy that overwhelmed me that day. My grandfather, who was 92 years old at the time, met his first cousins Jacob Phend and Elizabeth Phend Young for the first time! Jacob was 65 years old at the time and Elizabeth was 63. It would be a few more years before I finished the book, which was published in July 1991, and there would be many more of those special moments during that time. The joy of finally getting the book published was tempered somewhat with disappointment in the final product that came from the printers (someday I might write about that!), but even with its printing problems, the book was a huge success, and it was all due to the wonderful responses received from previously unknown relatives.

One of my "most favorite" genea-happy-dance moments came in June .. when I was contacted by Beth who turned out to be my 5th cousin once removed. Our common ancestors are my 5th great-grandparents Lewis Sisley (1765-1826) and his wife Margaret Ellis (1773-1870). A distant relationship to be sure, but her mother, Marge, had the original pages from the Sisley Family Bible! But, to top that off, they lived on the southwest side of Indianapolis, just a three-hour drive away. Of course, my mother and I made the trip south and spent a very pleasant and exciting day with Marge and her family. You can read more about that visit, as well as view the bible pages, in this post that was published in September .. and submitted to the Show and Tell version of the Carnival of Genealogy.

A relatively recent happy dance moment came in May .. when I was contacted by Kathy Foster. She had found my website with pages on my 3rd great-grandparents, John and Susannah (Hoffman) Berlin. Kathy was a descendant of Susannah's sister Mary (Hoffman) Walker. At that time the only information I had on Susannah was that she had been born in Columbiana County, Ohio and could be the daughter of John and Catherine (Coy) Hoffman. That info had come from another researcher in 1999 but with no documentation. Other things took up my time and I never got around to doing anything with that info. Kathy had the estate settlement papers for John Hoffman that named all eleven of his children, including Susan Berlin! In addition, she had done extensive research on the family and was able to take me back another generation on both the Hoffman and Coy sides. So not only did I now have the names of Susan's parents, I had the proof to go along with it, and the names of both sets of her grandparents!

A second happy dance was done in August that year (..) that also involved Kathy. I received an email from her that said she had just gotten an old photo album from one of her relatives which included pictures of Eli and Lovina (Berlin) Yarian, my 2nd great-grandparents! You see, Kathy's ancestor, Mary Hoffman was the second wife of Thomas Walker. Their son, James Madison Walker, was Kathy's ancestor. By his first marriage, Thomas Walker had several children, among whom was William Walker who had married Eli Yarian's sister, Susanna! Kathy and I aren't related at all through that connection, but the families obviously maintained a relationship even though her family was living in Stark County, Ohio and mine in Elkhart County, Indiana. In addition to the pictures of Eli and Lovina she sent pictures of Susanna Yarian and her husband William Walker. I had previously obtained several pictures of Lovina from the Nappanee Library but did not have any photos of Eli, so this was truly one of those amazing happy dance moments.

Eli Yarian, my 2nd great-grandfather.(1839-1895)Photo received from Kathy Foster in August ...