Family History

I have had a few different family history goals throughout the year.  I would have to say this was a nice successful event.  I want to first say that I really wanted to do temple work for my family because going to the temple for your family is so much more meaningful, from what I have been told.  On my dad's side things have been done.  On my mom's side we don't even know where we came from.  Great Grandma kept her mouth shut tight.  Last December I had huge success after asking our family history specialist how to do family history work without using ancestry.com.  She suggested to google the last name we had.  So that's what I did.  I found success in this.  A woman by the name of Joanne C. had posted her recent finds just the previous November.  Incredibly she had struck a little bit of gold and was able to trace my family history back about three generations.  Turns out her husband is a cousin of my mom's.  

Continuing on through the year Joanne made more discoveries.  We have talked a little bit.  She has given me great advice and how to search for names.  I was very grateful to find that on my mom's dad side there were Pettigrew's who fought in the Civil War.  At some point or another they lived in South Carolina.  Not far from where we live.  About a three hour drive.  We did visit Hilton Head in January but this visit to Winnsboro had a little more meaning.  This is where the family lived for a time.  

Willie and I planned a short weekend trip to get some information.  I was going for marriage certificates but in the end didn't find any.  I did however find the headstones of my family and found documents that perhaps showed their handwriting.  The library in Winnsboro had folders of information about my family.  Incredible.  I hope that I could go back and get more information.  So as fair warning there are a lot of photos of headstones.

The neat little story is that before my little journey I had been thinking of a quote that is on our blog and as we were going through the cemetery I was a little in doubt that we would find my family, but I was comforted to see this on a headstone.  

  

When I was about half way through the cemetery I was getting discouraged and I had gone through perhaps two bottles of water.  Keep in mind, I was about 8 months pregnant in nice hot and humid weather.  The boys needed to stay in the car; Willie kept them entertained.  Lincoln came out to me and he said something like don't worry mom we are going to find your grandpa, but I think he is dead.  Just a short while later we did find my family.  Here are the headstones of my family.

Our night stay was interesting.  We stayed at the only hotel in town.  We decided to make it only a one night trip.  Day two was nice.  We found more headstones from my family.

Parker picked flowers to put on the graves.  We did our best.

I took a paper and crayon and copied every headstone for my family.

We took our journey into town to the library.  While I was searching some documents the boys were able to do puzzles, play on the computer, look at books, have lunch, etc.  They were highly entertained at this cool library.

This is the room where I found a lot of information and I made copies of all that I thought I would need.

One of the Longs married a Pettigrew and so here are some Long headstones and the church they were buried at.

Our stop for dinner was a Waffle House.  Our first time visiting one.  Smelled like smoke, fly's were in the diner and the boys loved it so much because they had waffles for dinner and saw a train go by, plus they got some pretty neat hats to wear.

I am so grateful we were able to do a little family history.  Now I need to get all the information into my genealogy line.  Thank you Willie for all of your help with the boys and finding bathrooms when they needed them.  Thank you for keeping us hydrated and being patient with all the time it took to copy the headstones.  Thank you for your love.  Thank you for families, I love mine.