Friday, June 17, 2011
Santi's in Charleston
Just got in from dinner at Santi's Restaurante Mexicano in Charleston. Had cactus and pork... very spicy, but good stuff. Sweated out the two Dos Equis I had. A bit cooler now that I'm home. I love Charleston.... great places to eat!
Friday, June 3, 2011
Genealogy, Spoleto, and Way Too Hot!
Hope all is well with everyone. It has been a hot, hot, hot week in the SC Lowcountry. Temps have consistently reached the mid-90s all week, and there was less than a quarter inch of rain in Charleston during the month of May. Officially the second driest May on record in Charleston. We're struggling to keep the garden going, and it is costing us a fortune in water bills. But we also have three extra residents now. Both daughters are with us now, as is Susan's mother and her dog. So we have a full house, bursting at the seams with miscellaneous stuff from 4 different households, all trying to find a place to settle. We're continuing to battle the Town of James Island, which has turned down our request for a zoning variance to build Susan's mom a private cottage in our back yard. We can attach anything to our house, but we cannot build any free-standing second dwelling. It really sucks, because the first time we approached them (with a different administration, of course) they told us there was no problem with our request. Things change when a new mayor and his new folks come into power. Our builder has a meeting this morning with the town powers to see exactly what we can and cannot do. We'll see how it all turns out....
I'll be hitting the road around lunchtime today to head up to NC to visit with my mom tomorrow. Its a 4-hour-or-so drive. Should be uneventful.
We've been immersed in the annual Spoleto Arts Festival for the past week. The festival is 17 days of culture all over Charleston, with events happening throughout the day and night encompassing visual art, drama, music, opera, dance, and on and on. It has been wonderful so far. We've attended 3 of the major events, and a couple of the events for Piccolo Spoleto, a smaller and cheaper version of the biggie. Last night we went to see a "newgrass" musician, Sarah Jarosz, a 20-year old kid from Texas who is a wizard with stringed instruments and with her voice. She just released her second CD. The music was wonderful! And we've seen a production by KneeHigh Theater out of the UK, "The Red Shoes", which is a very dark macabre re-telling of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a girl who becomes obsessed with a pair of red shoes, leading to her eventual refusal of heaven in favor of the shoes. Just a wonderful production by a great cast.
And I'm continuing my attempt to re-focus my research efforts as I was reminded to do at the NGS Conference a few weeks ago. I was advised to break everything down into a series of questions to ask, and to attempt to answer each question before moving to the next, documenting the research every step of the way. So my first question concerns Benjamin Lovelace of Rutherford Co., NC, son of Barton and Lucy Watson (are you really surprised???). I've been trying track him in the early census records of Rutherford Co. As many of you know, he's been listed as Lovis, Lawless, and Loveless in those early records. However, he is absent from the 1820 census, and a fella named Ransom Loveless shows up, and he is not around either before or after 1820 in NC or any of the surrounding states (which is what I'm actually working on documenting). I have a sneaking suspicion that the census we all see for 1820 has a copying error, and that Benjamin's name was actually mistakenly copied down as Ransom. The R and B could easily be mistaken for each other, depending on handwriting, and with numerous n's and m's in the name, it is conceivable that the copying error occurred. So it is my immediate goal to show that Benjamin and Ransom are actually the same person.
And with that, I'm off to the internet to try and take a look at things in the national archives.
Hope you all have a great Friday! Work on myour own personal questions, one at a time, and everything will be OK :-)
I'll be hitting the road around lunchtime today to head up to NC to visit with my mom tomorrow. Its a 4-hour-or-so drive. Should be uneventful.
We've been immersed in the annual Spoleto Arts Festival for the past week. The festival is 17 days of culture all over Charleston, with events happening throughout the day and night encompassing visual art, drama, music, opera, dance, and on and on. It has been wonderful so far. We've attended 3 of the major events, and a couple of the events for Piccolo Spoleto, a smaller and cheaper version of the biggie. Last night we went to see a "newgrass" musician, Sarah Jarosz, a 20-year old kid from Texas who is a wizard with stringed instruments and with her voice. She just released her second CD. The music was wonderful! And we've seen a production by KneeHigh Theater out of the UK, "The Red Shoes", which is a very dark macabre re-telling of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a girl who becomes obsessed with a pair of red shoes, leading to her eventual refusal of heaven in favor of the shoes. Just a wonderful production by a great cast.
And I'm continuing my attempt to re-focus my research efforts as I was reminded to do at the NGS Conference a few weeks ago. I was advised to break everything down into a series of questions to ask, and to attempt to answer each question before moving to the next, documenting the research every step of the way. So my first question concerns Benjamin Lovelace of Rutherford Co., NC, son of Barton and Lucy Watson (are you really surprised???). I've been trying track him in the early census records of Rutherford Co. As many of you know, he's been listed as Lovis, Lawless, and Loveless in those early records. However, he is absent from the 1820 census, and a fella named Ransom Loveless shows up, and he is not around either before or after 1820 in NC or any of the surrounding states (which is what I'm actually working on documenting). I have a sneaking suspicion that the census we all see for 1820 has a copying error, and that Benjamin's name was actually mistakenly copied down as Ransom. The R and B could easily be mistaken for each other, depending on handwriting, and with numerous n's and m's in the name, it is conceivable that the copying error occurred. So it is my immediate goal to show that Benjamin and Ransom are actually the same person.
And with that, I'm off to the internet to try and take a look at things in the national archives.
Hope you all have a great Friday! Work on myour own personal questions, one at a time, and everything will be OK :-)
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