Letters From the Box

Artificial Intelligence.  It's the new thing.  New things often scare people, including me.  How will this new technology affect me?  Is it just a new way to mine my personal information? How trustworthy is it?  I don't think all of these questions have answers, yet, but yesterday I was lucky to attend a live webinar hosted jointly by the Anne Arundel Genealogical Society , of which I am a member, and the Howard County Genealogical Society :  AI and Genealogy: Trouble Ahead?  presented by Thomas MacEntee, of Genealogy Bargains . The presentation was excellent. Even though the title included "trouble ahead," Thomas really wasn't in the least bit alarmist about the use of AI in genealogy.  Quite the opposite, actually: he talked about the various different platforms - pros and cons and what having a subscription to each of them gave - over and above the free versions.  He also talked about some of the exciting uses of AI that are already in pla...

AlexeyMaltsev/ Shutterstock.com Fanny and Taylor both loved to read and they ADORED poetry - something that they passed down at least a couple of generations to my grandfather. I've never been a big poetry-reader, though I am a voracious consumer of books - I *have* to read every night before bed or I can't sleep.  This blog post will be a running list of the books and poems that they talk about as well as an occasional song.  I will have to actually read some of these! Please note that this will be an ongoing blog post: as I come across more titles, I'll add them to the list.  When available, I'll include a link to an online version. Books: Great Expectations  written between 1861 and 1862 by Charles Dickens From Wikipedia: In the 21st century, the novel retains good ratings among literary critics and in 2003 it was ranked 17th on the BBC's The Big Read poll. Take your pick from over 1 million copies on Hathi Trust The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit ...

T.T.L.V. and # # # Taylor writes T.T.L.V. and leaves several kisses at the  bottom of his letter to Fanny in August 1889. Maybe you noticed on that last blog introducing Taylor and Fanny, the "T.T.L.V." written at the bottom of Taylor's photograph.  Nobody really knew what that stood for.  We could figure out the "T.H." (Taylor Holt" and the "F.H.K." (Fanny Huckstep Kyle), but who or what was T.T.L.V.?   I know I've already said that these were mush love letters, but, really...you have no idea. They are REALLY MUSHY LOVE LETTERS.  Some are a single page, front and back, with nothing but mushy love.  It's sweet.  And a little ooky.  This is the Victorian era, after all - a time of "Mother Hubbard Dresses" - high necks, shapeless bags, basically - and the necessity of having a chaperone.  Taylor and Fanny met at a church social.  They were in Leadville, Colorado, which - at the time - had a lot of saloons, a fancy theater, and coul...

My second-great grandparents seem like an unlikely couple: he's a Yankee from Illinois, but with roots back to New England and the Mayflower; she's a quintessential Southern girl, born during Reconstruction in rural southwestern Virginia.   Taylor Holt, ca. 1888 T.H. = Taylor Holt F.H.K. = Frances Huckstep Kyle T.T.L.V. = you'll have to wait and see Taylor Holt was born in Kankakee, Illinois, on February 13, 1868. He was the only child of Stephen Philip and Aurelia "Lelila" Morgan Grimes  Holt.  Stephen died before Taylor's first birthday, so Lelia took Taylor back to her hometown of Princeton, Illinois to live with her mother and sisters in their little house on the southeast corner of the Main Square.  After Taylor graduated from Princeton High School, he lived for a little while in Chicago, where he apprenticed himself with a metal worker.  Though I haven't found the name of his employer there, he wrote in a letter to his family in October 1886, ...

This old sea chest is what started it all: my fascination with genealogy, my desire to learn everything I possibly could about the people  that were in that box.  I had seen it many times before in the attic of my grandparents' old farmhouse in Winchester, Virginia.  When I was young, it didn't hold much interest for me - there weren't any obvious photographs or anything - just a bunch of papers.  When I went to Loveland, Colorado in the summer of 2018 to visit my parents and my grandfather, I came across it again. Only this time, I was entranced.  I started to read some of the letters - they were mushy love letters written in the 1800s and I was hooked. When asked, my grandfather (who probably got this chest from his Aunt Royall Holt Tyler, though I'll never know now) was thrilled that I'd taken an interest in the family history and told me I could take it home with me.  And so I did and I've been reading and transcribing the contents within ever since....