Keys To My Heart

Posting Again

Cyndy — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 22:05:27 +0000

Haven’t updated this website in so long. No particular reason, but I think Facebook probably edged in for a while. Since that little temporary addiction has been quelled, and the Pinterest fascination is waning, I might actually get back to doing some genealogy work. It’s doubtful if that will occur for another month or so because I’m updating my curriculum for my music classes. I’m trying to get my files organized and linked together so teaching with technology will be even easier. You can be sure that old dogs CAN learn new tricks. It makes life interesting! If you would like to stop by my other blog for my classroom, go to mcatee.biz/music/ . It’s a slow work in progress, but once I get my content added, it should be handy to use in class!

Postcard From Little Rock Dated 1962

Cyndy — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 03:08:35 +0000

Here are some interesting newspaper articles I was notified about on Ancestry.com by an eagle-eyed genealogist. My Grandmother, Maggie Freeman Wade, was the daughter of Tabitha Barr Freeman. Tabitha’s sister, Lena, had a daughter, Blanche, who was married to Walter Fath. Their son, Donald, Grandma’s second cousin, sent a postcard in 1962 that never reached its destination until this week. Lena had moved to Fairfield, Ohio but is buried in Hamilton, also in Butler County, Ohio. Donald passed away in 1989, but his daughter, Linda is still alive and contacted the paper. The articles are really interesting!

Here are the links:

Mysterious Postcard Arrives In Fairfield, Ohio

Postcard Finally Makes It To Destination

Postcard Mystery Solved

I added my website in the comments, hoping that I could find more info about Walter, Blanche, and Donald Fath. Grandma must have been pretty proud of him, because she clipped his newspaper article. It was the final piece of the puzzle, the final clue in discovering who the little boy was that Lena was looking at so adoringly. It had to be her grandchild because she looked so proud! Click the scrapbook page for a better view, or go to my genealogy website to learn more about Grandma’s cousin.

Indiana Dahlia Farm: Located!

Cyndy — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 02:49:10 +0000

It seems rather odd that my Dad doesn’t know where the Indiana Dahlia Farm was located in New Albany, even though, he was born during the time his parents lived there. Its location has been a mystery though. Tonight, I think I finally know where it was, and the flower rows are still visible from Google satellites! I have contacted a couple of very nice ladies at the Floyd County Library. They could not find it in any of their listings. I recently found some extra info that I thought may help.

First of all, I received a nice email from Tracey in Tallahassee, Florida that asked if I wanted a honey pitcher that she had that had the name Sherfick Farms on it. Of course, I said! She had found me by Googling the name, but she didn’t know how it came to be in her family’s possession. After receiving it I emailed Dad a photo of it, and he said that it was an early glass jar, probably from the 1930?s. That made me want to look through some of the old photos to see if I could spot it. I didn’t, but I did notice something for the first time. On the back of one of the company trucks was an ad for the farm with a street address. In all the brochures and newspaper articles about his farm, I had never seen a street address, only the town’s name, New Albany.

Secondly, Washington Carnegie Library recently put an article in the Times-Herald that said that their newspaper archive was available online. I went to their site, typed in a few names, but struck gold when I added Grandpa’s name. In the Washington Herald of Sept. 19, 1924 it said that Thomas Sherfick bought the farm from E. L. Kunsman.

Armed with this information I went on Ancestry.com and found Edw. L. Kunsman in the 1920 US census, in New Albany, Indiana, in the 29th precinct. He was listed as a florist, and even though he was born in Kentucky, he spoke German.

So next I contacted the ladies of Floyd County, and one wrote back with info that some friends had mentioned there was a flower farm off Daisy Lane, which is right of Green Valley Road! So I Google mapped it and noticed ridges in the earth. Move down Daisy Lane, and all of a sudden there are acres of them! It has to be the farm!

To see for yourself, map the following–Google Earth works best. Now I want to go to New Albany with photos of the home to see if it is still standing. How incredible to finally to know this. The stock market crash left everyone in 1929 in pretty bad financial shape, so it is no wonder that by the census of 1930, Dad was living with his family in Kentucky as Grandpa sold the farm and was now a salesman, I think of anvils, but will have to check my memory later.

400-498 E Daisy Ln
New Albany, Indiana 47150
United States

Thanks everyone for all the help!

Mooning Over Moon Dance Cliffs

Cyndy — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 04:13:07 +0000

In August my daughter, Carrie, is marrying a really nice man, Rob. They make such a cute couple! They are getting married in August in Negril, Jamaica at the Moon Dance Cliffs Resort. I can’t wait to go as I’ve never been south of Florida! Here is the Google map of the location. I will definitely take my camera to take pictures of not only family but the cliffs, the lighthouse just north oh the hotel, and of course, all the pretty flowers!

View Larger Map

Jamaica Me Crazy

Be It Ever So Humble

Cyndy — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:23:19 +0000

Last weekend, Mom, Dad, my niece Amy, and I took a nice little drive through Bedford. It was a beautiful day for a drive, and we saw lots of yard sales, a bunch of horses, turkeys, and even a camel. We decided to keep going and ended up in Columbus, Indiana where Mom and Dad used to live when they were first married. Dad was in the Air Force at the Atterbury Air Force Base. This base has also been called Bakalar Air Base, but now it is the home of the Columbus Municipal Airport. Here are a few color slides of the base and their home taken with Mom’s Brownie camera. Art and Marian Hart lived with them in the 2-apartment home. Art and Marian now live in Florida, and Mom and Dad still keep in touch with them.

Next we went to the Garland Brook Cemetery to see the grave of Dad’s brother, Charles William “Billy” Sherfick. Click here to see more info about Uncle Bill. After hunting for a while because it’s one of those cemeteries where all the new headstones are flat to the ground, we decided to look for the house Mom and Dad lived in while at Columbus. We didn’t know if it was swallowed up or not by the Cummins Diesel Engines plant (where Mom worked and could walk to easily because it was only a block away). They thought the house was 623 California Street, but they aren’t totally convinced this house is the same one due to the new porch. The turquoise car is Mom and Dad’s in 1954. Another reason for confusion was that the street now was a one way street. It’s amazing that the streets and houses were still there almost 60 years later!

After the success of finding at least the street where Mom & Dad lived, I tried Googling another address I’ve been curious about. Mary Freeman Lobbey, Grandma Wade’s sister (and source of a majority of my ancestry photos) at one time lived in California with her husband Fred. I have a couple of photos of them standing in front of their home in 1932 with the address 1340 West 37 Place, Los Angeles, California. Thinking that is WAY too long of time for a home to stand in such a developed metropolis, I looked anyway on Google Earth. After rotating the view, it’s pretty clear that the house still stands, although the trellis on the front has been modified to some sort of covered porch. It’s the house with the tiny red Google icon on the roof. That’s almost 80 years!

It would be fun to travel to California again, this time armed with the address of Mary and Fred. They only lived a short distance from the University of Southern California and the LA Memorial Coliseum.

The air base went through many name changes from its start as the Columbus Air Support Command Base to Atterbury Army Air Field in 1943, till base closing in 1946. The base reopened as Atterbury Air Force Base then renamed Bakalar Air Force Base October 1954. In 1972 the base was renamed Bakalar Municipal Airport and later known as Columbus Bakalar Airport. In 1981 Bakalar was dropped and became Columbus Municipal Airport.

William and Rebecca (Wade) Gabbert

Cyndy — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:39:43 +0000

Today I received a nice letter with a photo of William and Rebecca from my double cousin, Marlene Versluis of Glendale, Arizona. I was really excited because I don’t have any photos of my Great Grandfather, George Washington Wade, Senior. He is the ONLY Great Grandparent of whom I’m missing a photo! This photo is of his father’s sister and his mother’s brother. Rebecca Wade Gabbert was the sister of John William Wade, who was my Great Great Grandfather and my Grandpa Wade’s Grandfather. William Gabbert was not only the husband of Rebecca Wade, but he was also the brother of John Wade’s wife, Mary Polly Gabbert. I got to see John Wade’s grave in December of 2005, when my Aunt Joan and Uncle Bill drove me around to some local cemeteries. One was the Union Chapel or Bachelor Cemetery–way out past Deep Cut Lake. It is the final resting place of John William Wade and his second wife, Virginia Robertson. Unfortunately, no one knows where Polly is buried. Polly’s mother is buried in an empty field near Salem, Indiana. I went there in November 2008. There is just one slab on the ground, but the area has a fence around space for two graves. Polly’s mother, also a Polly, Polly DePauw Gabbert, was the sister of Napoleon Bonapart DePauw. He also was the only relative that I ever found who owned slaves at one time or another, as in his will in 1858, he gave two their freedom. Anyway, Napoleon put these slabs on several graves of close relatives (his brothers, sister, and father).

Speaking of slaves, William and Rebecca Gabbert were very involved as southern sympathizers. They were living in Missouri at the time of the Civil War. They not only were sympathizers, but William was a famous guerrilla Bushwhacker in Vernon County, Missouri. His exploits and those of his and Rebecca’s daughter and son, Eliza and John, and John’s wife Lennora, are chronicled in several books and displays at the Bushwhacker Museum, located in Nevada, Missouri. For more info about Rebecca and William, see my genealogy website. Don’t forget to click the links in the History section on their individual pages for more stories. Also, check out their children, John and Eliza, for more tales about spying for the Confederacy. John’s wife, Lennora, and Eliza both risked their lives as couriers. In the post about Confederate sisters, Lennora and Eliza tricked Northern soldiers into releasing their captured friends by posing as their distraught lovers. John Gabbert however had died in the fighting in 1863.

If you are interested in these Gabberts and want to find out more about them, I’ve also been corresponding with Jon Lockhart. John Gabbert and Polly Gabbert Wade’s older sister, Rachel Gabbert Lockhart, is his ancestor. He has a great blog called Family Ramblings and has done a lot of research on the Gabberts and the DePauw’s. Also, on this page, Merida Wade, John Wade’s father, is mentioned in a couple of posts about land patents. The two maps show where all the families (Wades, Gabberts, DePauws, Lockharts, etc.) originally lived in Washington County, Indiana. The Wade Farm was very close to West Washington High School, a few miles from Salem. Merrida and his wife Ferrabee, are buried just down the road at the site of the current Mount Tabor Church of Christ. I visited there in January of 2009, but I couldn’t find their graves, but I did find several other family members.

Here are some photos related to this post:

Stop and Smell the Roses

Cyndy — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:44:45 +0000

Mac Davis said it best. You gotta stop. And smell the roses. This week has been wild for me. I’ve been sick from a flu bug for the past two weeks so it was nice hearing from the girls that I was to receive some sort of surprise this week from both of them. Thursday I received first a card and two dozen beautiful (really beautiful) roses in assorted colors. I stopped at the post office on the way home from work that day, and I also got a package with bath salts and an iTunes gift card. Wow! Unfortunately, I no more than got home and put the flowers in their vase than I got a call from Mom that said that Dad needed to have another heart surgery. How can that be when he has been doing so well? So I go to the doctor on Friday because I want to make sure that I can head to Florida to be with Mom. I had 102 degree fever (no idea, hope I didn’t infect any school kids on Thursday) but no pneumonia. I got my medicine and went home to bed. By Friday evening my fever was gone. Carrie was worried the flowers wouldn’t be pretty because they were delayed two days due to the heavy snow we had here in southern Indiana. I sent the girls some pictures on my iPhone, but they didn’t do them justice, and Sarah couldn’t download them on her phone. There was nothing else to do but to pull out my DSL and take some more. Hey! It’s not often I get photo subjects that don’t yell at me, “Mom, put the camera down!” I decided to take pictures of them all over the house–in the living room, by the window, on the table, etc. When I put them on the hearth, a funny thing happened. My silly cat started smelling them, walking around the vase to smell all the different colored roses. So I put them on the floor and snapped away quite happily until I started losing my good daylight. I may not have been able to smell the roses, but somebody else sure did!

Guess Who? The Who!

Cyndy — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:08:10 +0000

When I was much younger, I used to get The Who and The Guess Who mixed up. I learned to love the different styles of both the bands however. It’s exciting that one of the groups, The Who, will be playing at the Super Bowl. I used to have such a crush on Roger Daltry. When I saw the movie Tommy was on tv earlier this year, I recorded it on my computer. I still love their music and hope they play “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Baba O’Riley” and “Who Are You.” Of course, “Pinball Wizard” is a favorite, but I also play a lot of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “I Can See For Miles,” “Magic Bus,” and “My Generation.” “Squeeze Box” used to crack me up. “The Seeker” is on one of my Rock Band games, but I don’t remember for sure which one. The Who are from Britain, and I think the Guess Who are from Canada, but they are both on several playlists in my iTunes.

I braved the snow today to go to CVS in Loogootee. I could be wrong, but I don’t think there is any place in Shoals that sells Advil Cold & Sinus. That product is the only thing that can keep me going when my allergies are bad. It could be a cold or flu, but I’m hoping it’s just allergies that’s had me down for the last couple of days. The trees were so beautiful on the drive over, so I stopped and took some pictures. After Christmas I bought a small little camera to keep with me so I don’t have to haul the DSL around. The snow is nothing like what Carrie is dealing with in the Baltimore/DC area, but I still thought it was really pretty.

Heart, Be Still

Cyndy — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:54:18 +0000

The Indianapolis Colts are going to the Super Bowl, but not until I had sufficiently yelled at Sylvia’s fabulous big screen tv and squashed and banged a Mountain Dew bottle to pieces. I definitely did NOT like the first quarter, but things started looking up in the second one. I did spot Erica, my cousin’s daughter and a Colt’s cheerleader, a couple of times, but they put a great big black text over top her. Why do the tv people do that? If you’re going to have a big sign up on the middle of the screen, at least put background shots, not people’s faces! Good grief! It was a great game though. I’m just hoping that Brock, the teacher whose room is right next door to mine (and a former student as well), will not be too tortured tomorrow at school. I have a feeling he will be because he actually showed up at ND in a Jet’s jersey. Erica’s and Brock’s pictures are below as well as some flash photos from the Indy Star website. All that Blue is beautiful!

AFC Championship: Colts vs. Jets fans – More The Indianapolis Star Galleries

Two Shoals Finds

Cyndy — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:52:06 +0000

First of all, I found some Shoals pictures on Google in the Life Magazine section. Evidently, Life Magazine came to Shoals in 1950 to photograph the Robert Sanders family. Robert had been captured by the North Koreans during the Korean War. I did a Google search and found only one piece of info about him on the website of the Korean War Project. There was this post by Tony Sanders, his nephew, from 1998:

21st Inf Reg

Looking for information re service record of my late uncle, Paul Robert Sanders. Captured and POW for 38 months, Korea. Don’t know a lot about his service there. Life Magazine did a piece on him and my grandparents in their 20 Sept 1950 issue. I have discovered that he was a POW from 7-11-50 to 8-29-53. I believe that he was a Sgt. at the time of capture, not sure.

That would be an amazing thing to have a piece of your family’s life documented, no less than by Life Magazine. The photos they took are really interesting. Here they are in all their black and white glory. My favorites are of the downtown scenes. When did we have trees on Main Street? Well, I guess in 1950, but I sure don’t remember them, and I was born in ’56. And we had a Ford dealer downtown too? I can’t remember the post office being on Main Street, but I remember when the new post office was built, so I’m sure I went to the old one. What in the world is the building at the new post office location? Was it a large home or a hotel or something? I also love the depot pictures. You can see the Cutsinger Hotel where Lucille stayed (presently the American Legion) and even part of the Sherfick Furniture Factory in the background. It would only be two more years before the factory would burn down. I wish these photos would be in color though as I would love to know if the cars were different colors–like that popular 50′s turquoise color–or if it was not quite the fashion yet in 1950 and so all the cars were shades of gray. Also, was the sign that said Meats part of the original Tredway grocery store? I have a picture of the inside on my genealogy website. Did Coca-Cola give away free signs or something? It seems like every store had a Coca-Cola sign.

My second find was at a YouTube site. After my first success at Google Images, I tried searching for Shoals on YouTube and found this great video. It must have been made by a Terre Haute TV station, although I’m not sure which one. It tells the story of two unusual Indiana Mascot names. Ironically, I lived at both places. Shoals Jug Rox and Speedway Sparkplugs are the featured mascots. I lived in Speedway for two years when I first got married in 1978. It was the time of the Speedway bombings and the Burger Chef murders. Four kids who closed the restaurant were taken out to some fields and gun-downed. Oh, and I also worked there up to a few weeks before–arrrggg. You know, after that happened, I seriously began to wonder about myself. My grandma was in a horrible fatality, and her car was brought in to the Ford dealership while I was at my high school prom–right next door. I go to the University of Evansville, and the whole basketball team and several others die in a horrible plane crash. Then I move to Speedway, and a bomb goes off in a dumpster in the shopping center right next to my apartment. Not to mention the Burger Chef murders where I worked just for the fun of it. I knew two of the four kids killed. Wouldn’t you know that my brother-in-law was in the Pentagon on 9-11 in the very section where the plane hit it?

Well, at least this video is cheery. It shows my sister’s classmate, Mike Harding. And one thing more, the plaster Jug Rock on the principal’s desk in the video was made by my grandmother (the very same one who was killed on my prom night). I know because she created the mold at her flower shop. Are you hearing any weird Twilight Zone music? Doo doo doo doo . . . . . . .

Good finds. Happy hunting.