All My Ancestors

Written for 52 Weeks To Better Genealogy – Challenge #7

from Amy Lenertz Coffin at http://wetree.blogspot.com/2010/01/52-weeks-to-better-genealogy.html

Play with Google Maps (http://maps.google.com). This is a helpful tool for determining the locations of addresses in your family history. Where your ancestral homestead once stood may now be a warehouse, a parking lot or a field. Perhaps the house is still there. When you input addresses in Google Maps, don’t forget to use the Satellite View and Street View options for perspectives that put you were right there where your ancestors once stood. If you’ve used this tool before, take sometime and play with it again. Push all the buttons, click all the links and devise new ways it can help with your personal genealogy research. If you have a genealogy blog, write about your experiences with Google Maps, or suggest similar easy (and free) tools that have helped in your own research.

As I’ve written here many times, I come from a family of farmers–persons who had land, for the most part.  Those farms and ranches are no longer in the family.  But I can visit any time I like using Google Map.

My maternal grandparents lived on a ranch in South Dakota.

The main buildings were the house and the barn.  The barn, at the time of this photo, sported my grandad’s brand above the doors, Lazy XY.  The house actually faced north, but this is the southern exposure.  It was too cold in South Dakota to have a north facing entry, so we always used the “back porch” as the entry.

My grandparents had moved most of their things back to Texas by the 1980s–they were in their 80s by then and they first spent winters in Oklahoma and Texas with my folks and my aunt and uncle, and later stayed “in the south” year round.  Shortly before my grandmother died in 1998, the house burned.  We don’t know the details, we just know that it burned to the ground.  In a sense, it was a blessing that the house took care of itself–

When I find myself thinking about the carefree summers I spent at my grandparents’ ranch, I look at my photos, but I also often pull up their place on Google Maps:

I can still see the barn and the tree rows planted east of the house to catch the wind and snow.  A trailer home replaces the house for the family that lives there now.  If I really want to, I can move to the right on the map to “roam” the pasture.  And I can follow the road (306th Ave. on this map) a couple of miles down the hill to the little village of Canning where my grandmother ran the country store and post office, and where we lived the year I was in the 6th grade.

This picture brings back lots of memories.

Over there at the left is the beginning of the spring-fed lakes where we swam in the summer time and ice-skated in the winter.  At the right, the “top” of Cactus Loop, is where the school was.  There was a cemetery behind it and a huge hill down the side.  We sledded in the winter and rolled down in tractor tires in the spring.  Why we weren’t killed is amazing to me.  My grandmother’s store and PO was to the left of the intersection of Chesley Rd and 206th St.  It looks like there’s some sort of barn there now.  Above where Spring St, crosses Chesley St. is the church, with another cemetery behind it.  On up that hill takes me back to my grandparent’s ranch.  See the house at the lower right?  I won’t include the name of the people who live here, but my granddad helped build that house–with someone as particular as he was–they got along fine.  The drilled holes for the nails before they pounded them in–no nail guns here.

I have these places, and others, bookmarked on Google Map.  I like visiting them occasionally.  There’s a country cemetery in Beaver County I like to visit–it’s easy to count the miles as I travel down the road, and I know how many miles and which directions it is to visit where my great Aunt Edna and Uncle Gurly lived, and where my great-grandparents lived out there in Beaver County Oklahoma.

And then I can always “drive-by” the house where I grew up (marked with the small white heart)–it’s a different color now but it’s still located across the street from the high school, between the First Christian Church and the Church of Christ on Jackson Dr., and I can drag Main Street if I’m feeling really nostalgic.