RLP 237: The Ancestor I’d Like to Meet: Ettie Belle Harris

Nicole (2s):
This is Research Like A Pro, episode 237 The Ancestor. I’d like to meet Eddi Bell Harris Welcome to Research Like a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited Genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team@familylocket.com and the authors of Research Like, a Pro A Genealogist Guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion Volume Research Like a Pro with dna, Join, Diana, and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (43s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research. Like a Pro

Diana (48s):
Hi Nicole. How. are you today?

Nicole (49s):
Great. I just finished making an Airtable video for our Research Like a Pro with DNA, eCourse and Study Group, and it was two hours long, but it’d explained every single part of that Airtable based template.

Diana (60s):
That’s gonna be so great because if you are new to Airtable, every single thing needs to be explained. It’s just so easy once you’ve worked with it and you understand how to do it, but at first that seems kind of foreign, so Thank you for doing that, that will be such a helpful thing for everybody in the

Nicole (1m 17s):
Course. I hope so. What about you?

Diana (1m 18s):
Well, I was just finishing up my reading of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly from September, 2021. I’m a little behind, I gotta catch up. and I was to the review section. So at the very end they have, you know, the articles, case studies first about three or four per issue. And then at the end they have reviews and they have some really interesting books. I always read the reviews because I wanna know what books are out there. And so this one only had two reviews, so I’ll just tell you about both of them. One is called Clan Callahan, the OC Callahan Family of County Cork, and it’s edited by Joseph f o Callahan.

Diana (1m 58s):
So it just talks about how he is a historian at heart and it has been his life’s work to study the history of the OC Callahan clan and I thought. Man, if you are an Irish researcher and you’re an OC Callahan especially, you need to get that book because it looks so fascinating. And it is published by Genealogical Publishing Company. He originally wrote the first book in 2005, but this is a revision from 2020. The review was done by Bridget Sunderland cg. I like how she finishes it up. She says perhaps most essential to Genealogist are the family narratives presented throughout the book, but especially those within the OC Callahan diaspora chapter.

Diana (2m 42s):
In these narratives, the author demonstrates his greatest talent connecting people within their historical time and place, which I thought was really neat. Isn’t that what we’re always trying to do with our family history is connect people. Yeah. You know,

Nicole (2m 53s):
I love that. And also Bridget Sunderland was in my pro gen study group, so hi Bridget.

Diana (2m 58s):
Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, it’s fun. I’ve written a couple of reviews for that section and we had our book, Research Like, a Pro DNA reviewed in that section. So you know, if maybe you have been reading the NGS Q as we like to call it and have been skipping the reviews, I would recommend you read those. You can Discover some Really great gems of a book there.

Nicole (3m 17s):
Nice. Well, the announcements for today are that we have our Research Like, a Pro Webinar series ongoing in 2023. And the first one, Diana taught about her Benjamin Cox case study. And this next one coming up, I’ll be teaching about my research in the Daniel Arnold project that we did for a client. And that one’s going to be on February 21st at 11:00 AM Mountain Standard Time. That’s a Tuesday and we’re going to be alternating every month between Tuesdays and Saturdays. So the first one in January was on Saturday, then February is Tuesday and back and forth. It’s always at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. So we’re looking forward to that next one.

Diana (3m 56s):
Oh yeah, it’s So fun to do these webinars and be discussing our research and taking questions. I think that’s one of the funnest things about a live Webinar is being able to ask whatever question you have as you’re watching. And it’s fun for us to be able to answer those and explain more things.

Nicole (4m 11s):
Absolutely. And just a reminder that you can always join our newsletter to get that every Monday with notices about our new blog posts, new podcast episode, any news we have. And then sometimes we have coupons and sales. And also another reminder that Roots Tech is coming up really fast. So if you’re going in person, it’s just $98 and NGS is coming up, it’s the end of May. And Diana and I are both speaking at ngs. So we’re excited about that. and I’m teaching about Airtable and Advanced Techniques resorting and grouping. And then another class I’m teaching is going to be about Shiva Harpe and using DNA evidence to identify her parents.

Diana (4m 54s):
NGS will be in Virginia Richmond Virginia. And we’re excited to go out because I have never been to Richmond and I. Think Nicole, you have been to Virginia? Yes,

Nicole (5m 3s):
I’ve visited DC in Virginia a few times,

Diana (5m 6s):
So we’re excited. And one of my lectures is on separating Virginians of the same name and that will actually be part of their two day online live. And so if you can’t come out to Virginia, you can purchase that package and you get 10 lectures live and I will be part of that for one of mine. So that will be fun to have that opportunity to speak to you virtually as well. And then I have two other lectures, one on researching females in the early 18 hundreds, which I have a fun case study for that about my poly Cessna Royston. And then the other topic is what to do with your ancestry through lines, you know, the DNA through lines.

Diana (5m 48s):
So I have a couple of fun case studies examples we’ll be working through with that one as well. So lots of exciting things coming up. Nicole.

Nicole (5m 55s):
Yeah, I’m excited to go. Go to both Salt Lake City for Roots Tech and Richmond Virginia for NGS conference.

Diana (6m 3s):
Well we hope to see some of you there. Well, let’s get into our topic for the day. And today we’re going to talk about writing family stories. And this was prompted because I decided I wanted to take up the 52 ancestors in 52 weeks yearly challenge. This has been going on for a few years. Amy Johnson Crow hosts this and I signed up to do it two or three years ago, but I never really did it. And for some reason this year I saw that email come through and the idea and I thought, I can do this. I can write a blog post every week following the prompt. They don’t have to be long, they can be long enough.

Diana (6m 43s):
You know, if that week I wanna write a lot or it could be short, but I’ve been feeling the real need to just spend a little bit more time with my ancestors. Don’t you feel like sometimes we get so caught up in our client work that we neglect our own ancestors?

Nicole (6m 57s):
It is such a great way to focus on the things that are important to you and your own family, to just have that reminder of, okay, this week I’m gonna learn about or write about somebody in my own family

Diana (7m 8s):
And I’ve done so much research over the years, but if it’s all hiding in my program or my online tree or in my paper files, you know, that’s not as great as having a little story written and put out there somewhere for other people to read. Not to mention that whenever you write, you really internalize that ancestor’s life more and it’s a prompt to learn more. So as we talk about the Ancestor for this week that I started with, I’m going to share some things that I learned and some aha moments that came, which I think is really one of the great blessings of writing about our ancestors rather than just researching forever.

Diana (7m 53s):
Gotta write.

Nicole (7m 54s):
Yeah, I love that. and I was just thinking about, you know, one of the other benefits of sharing family stories on your blog, which is I think, isn’t that the challenge from Amy? Johnson Crow is to share it on your blog.

Diana (8m 7s):
Yeah. On your blog. Or she has a Facebook group set up, especially for this. So you can even just put a photo and write a little paragraph on her Facebook page, you know, just to share any way, even if you don’t

Nicole (8m 19s):
Have a blog. Nice.

Diana (8m 20s):
Right.

Nicole (8m 21s):
Well even beyond, you know, the act of doing it and how joyful that can be. It’s so cool how you can connect with relatives and cousins, how they can find it if they’re searching for the names that you mentioned in the post. And already you have one commenter who’s one of our followers who mentioned she’s related to this family.

Diana (8m 42s):
I know, it is really fun. And quite honestly, that’s how I found out about George W. Dillard not being the father of Cynthia, because someone who read my blog post said, oh, I have the Bible pages. So getting your stuff out there is great. You know, another thing that you could do for writing is to go onto family search on your ancestors page and do the the little life sketch, or you could even do a link to your blog or whatever. So I think I might do that with this challenge as well to make sure I am getting some things put out on family search as well for these ancestors, because that really is a collaborative tree that everyone can go on and look at.

Nicole (9m 21s):
Yeah, that’s so great. Do you think you’ll do a link to the blog post or will you save the post as like a PDF and upload it to the memory section?

Diana (9m 29s):
You know, I think maybe that would be the best. I could do both, but I think it would be nice to just have it available as a pdf. I’ll have to think about that. Very

Nicole (9m 37s):
Cool. Well let’s start off talking about this Ancestor Ettie, Bell Harris. You and I had started working on writing a biography of her life when I was just like, I don’t know, 14.

Diana (9m 49s):
Yeah, yeah, I think you were a teenager. Right. And the reason I chose to start with Ettie, Bell Harris is because the prompt for this first week was The Ancestor. I’d like to meet every week in the 52 week challenger’s a prompt. And so this was really easy for me because this is my paternal grandmother, but she died before I was born and so I never met her. And you know, just like with a parent that you never met, a grandparent that you never met just kind of leaves you with this little bit of a hole. You know, just wondering what she would’ve been like if you could really have met her. I think that’s probably why I encouraged you to research her a little bit more because I wanted to know more about her.

Nicole (10m 33s):
Absolutely. And, and I wanted to know about all my ancestors. I remember that you gave me a big binder called Book of Remembrance and I started putting, it was like a leather bound that was like fancy and I had gold crypt on the front. I put in pedigree charts, I made a photo pedigree chart and printed it and put it in there. And then I started just copying all of the papers that dad and you had of different ancestors biographies and I noticed that some were missing. And one of the ones that we didn’t have yet was a biography of Ettie Bell Harris. And so I thought, oh well Mom, can you write that? And, and we just decided to do it together and you encouraged me to do it for one of my goals for learning and growing in church.

Nicole (11m 15s):
So I decided, you know, because we emphasized family history at church, that I would set it as a goal for personal progress, which was a program for young women. So I started gathering remembrances of her and you encouraged me to write letters to my grandpa, which was her son, your dad and his sister Helen and his aunt Christine. Yep. So grandpa’s Aunt Christine was kind of more like his age, but she was technically his aunt. Right,

Diana (11m 43s):
Right. And she was really close to Ettie Bell because you know, she was the same age as, as Bob, Helen and Ch, the three children, Christine’s mother died with her birth and so she just stayed close with their family. So I think she was like another mother figure to Christine. So it was really neat to get those responses back. You know, you came up with some really good questions and sent those off to them and they all wrote back and they were all very different in their responses, which I think is so wonderful about interviewing different members of the family to get their perspectives.

Nicole (12m 23s):
Yeah, their answers were really different and I noticed the women focused more on like the food and spirituality and longer anecdotes than I remember grandpa’s answers were sometimes more funny or just the things that he remembered or wanted to perpetuate were just of a different nature. And I’ll have to go back and read all his answers, but some of them were shorter when his sisters was, were longer. And so it was just good to have three people sharing.

Diana (12m 51s):
Yeah, three perspectives. And you learned from each one of them. So it really was neat to have those. Well let me just talk a little bit about Ettie Bell so everybody can get the context. She was born on 28 March, 1907 in Marietta Love County, Oklahoma, and died on 22 May, 1954 in Sanger Fresno, California. And she was only 47 years old, which is why I never met her. She died very young because she had contracted rheumatic fever as a child and she had this rheumatic heart for the rest of her life. So in the letters they said that they never realized that she had been ill or had felt, you know, really tired.

Diana (13m 34s):
She just never complained. And then, but at the very end of her life, you know, those last few years she got really ill from her rheumatic heart. But evidently it had affected her whole life. Just nobody knew. Hmm. So I just think she’s such a good example of, you know, making it through all these challenges. And the word that I keep thinking of about her is how she met each one of those challenges with grace. Everybody commented in their letters about her kindness and generosity and her service to others. So you can see it’s a person I really need to meet. Sad, sad I didn’t get to meet her, but my dad, he would always comment on her good cooking. So you know, food was important to him after having come through the depression and not having had enough food lots of days.

Diana (14m 21s):
He always appreciated food, good food when he could get it.

Nicole (14m 24s):
Yeah, that is great. I do remember him talking about the different food that she would cook,

Diana (14m 28s):
The black eyed peas and cornbread that he actually got really tired of, but he loved her cakes and he’d always talk about these cakes that would fall in the middle and then they were so gooey and yummy. So you know, some of the challenges, if you think to that era, she lived through the depression of the 1930s and they were out in Oklahoma and the Dust Bowl and it was really difficult. And then she sent both of her boys off to war in World War ii. So two really severe things that she went through. So one of the neat gifts that I was given by you was a portrait of her. So you know, how did you even have the idea of having that commissioned by our cousin?

Nicole (15m 13s):
Oh, I was doing some DNA match analysis and I found a cousin, a bone cousin, the Harris family, one of the daughters married a bone, so I found a match out in Oklahoma and got in touch with his son and he was a painter and he shared a lot of his paintings on Facebook. And so I just reached out to him and kind of was looking at his art and was talking about the DNA match with his dad. And then later I just saw some paintings that he had done and I thought, you know, it’d be really cool to have him paint a portrait of one of my ancestors. And since we’re related on this Harris line, it would be cool to see a painting of Ettie, Bell. Harris and I had looked at all of her pictures and a lot of them were kind of small and low resolution, and I wanted one of her where she was like smiling.

Nicole (15m 59s):
And so we had a couple really small pictures of her smiling and some of the bigger pictures were her and more serious. And so I asked him if he would paint one and I sent him all the pictures I had and told him I want her to be smiling in the picture. And so he painted that for me and I gave it to you for Christmas

Diana (16m 16s):
And I love it. It was so neat. and I love that, it’s just simple because it’s got a tan background and she is in sepia tones. So you know, wearing a off-white dress and it just is so fitting with her life, you know, she loved country western music. I discovered that was her life, the West agricultural life, you know, that that’s what she knew. So I do treasure that painting and I have it right here by my computer and I get to look at her all the time or have her looking down on me. So it’s kind of a neat connection. I love it. Yeah. The other thing that I have as a remembrance of her is a China bull that I didn’t even know was hers until I believe my mother gave it to me.

Diana (16m 58s):
And she said, well you should have this, this is Ettie Bell’s Bull. And I was so excited because I didn’t have anything else handed down from her. My other grandmother on the maternal side, I had a lot of things that when she passed away I inherited or you know, were given to me. But from Ettie Bell, I only have this bowl and it’s kind of beat up, it’s a little bit chipped, but it really is a treasure because I think of all the meals that she made and put on her table and probably use this beautiful white China bowl to feed her family. So this is kind of a neat remembrance.

Nicole (17m 34s):
That is really neat. I love that you have that displayed in one of your China hutches at home.

Diana (17m 40s):
Yeah, and I actually took a picture of that and wrote a little memory about it and put it on family search because I just think it’s neat to have little, small bites of memories put out there. And so I don’t have a picture with her and myself, but I have her China Bowl. It’s a connection. That’s great. All right. So as I was writing this blog post about the Ancestor I’d like to meet, I decided I would just write a little bit of a history of her life and you know, include some pictures and I realized I had never done a timeline on Ettie Bell. And so I pulled up an Airtable template and started a timeline and put in all the records that I have and put in the interviews from Bob and Helen and Christine and just tried to get a really good timeline of her life.

Diana (18m 32s):
And it was so interesting when I did that, I put together a few things I really had never thought of. So for instance, she was born in 1907 and it was still Indian territory, Chickasaw Nation, Indian territory because Oklahoma didn’t have statehood later that fall. And so she, Taku was born in Indian territory, even though we always say, you know, she’s born in Oklahoma. Yeah. So it’s always fun to really look at the history and, but her parents had been born in Texas but had moved north just over the Texas and Oklahoma border to Indian territory by 1900 and were missing that 1890 census. So you know, they’re in 1880 in Texas and in 1900 they’re in Indian territory.

Diana (19m 16s):
And so I, you know, don’t really know when they moved north, but both the Harris and Frazier families had moved there and Doc and Alice got married and had this, these two children, they had Ettie Bell and they had her brother Bert. And the interesting thing that I have seen before, and it reminded me when I did the, the Airtable timeline, was that in 1910, Alice Frazier Harris Eddie’s mother reported that she had three children but only two living. And nobody ever talked about a child that died. So I still don’t know who that child was cuz nobody talked about it. And so that still remains a mystery for me.

Diana (19m 59s):
But Ettie grew up in Love County. So she was both in the Beville and Washington Townships of Love County and her father dot Caris farmed. And so, you know, realizing that both the families were right there, I hadn’t realized she would’ve grown up with like all of her cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents all right there around her. You know, isn’t it funny how we just don’t put our ancestors in context of their families sometimes? Yeah. Yeah. So I had a neat picture of her, which really is a treasure with her grandmother, Nancy Briscoe Frazier and I, think it was about 1913. But I love that picture.

Diana (20m 40s):
And Nancy looks, she looks pretty old and she was pretty old this time. She had lived through the Civil War as a young woman and she’s out here in Indian territory and then she’s got these two little grandchildren and then there’s a picture taken the same day of Ettie just sitting on the ground with a doll, this beautiful little China doll. So neat pictures, I’ve always loved those.

Nicole (21m 0s):
So you think the other little boy in the picture is one of the other grandchildren? Do you know who it could be?

Diana (21m 5s):
It’s Bert, it’s Eddie’s brother.

Nicole (21m 7s):
Oh, okay.

Diana (21m 8s):
Bert. Yeah. Yeah. That came down through the family that was Bert. So,

Nicole (21m 12s):
So cute to see his little pants and the suspenders and their cute little shoes.

Diana (21m 17s):
It’s great. And her dress is white and it looks like it’s eyelet on the edge. So I mean they’ve had some nice clothes, she was dressed up and she gotta have her doll in the picture. It was a special day, I think for those photographs.

Nicole (21m 31s):
Yeah. I wonder what the occasion was if it was a family reunion or just decided to take some pictures and I’m, I’m guessing there were more pictures taken that day that maybe we don’t have that other people in the family have.

Diana (21m 41s):
Yeah, you know, it could have been like the birthday of their grandmother,

Nicole (21m 47s):
Maybe you can see what her birthday was and see if it could have been that same day. It looks kind of like, it could have been the summer,

Diana (21m 53s):
Right? Trees. The trees and sitting on the grass and stuff. Yeah. So Ettie was really young. She got married, she was just barely 17 in 1924. And she and my grandfather Charles Leslie Schultz were married in Texas. And so by then apparently they had moved south again to Texas where his dad was farming and his first job was on the L f D ranch and he worked riding pasture greasing 50 windmills. So every day he’d get on his horse and have to go 10 to these windmills. And my dad did tell, or my grandpa and my dad both told a funny story about how one day Ettie went out with them riding the horse.

Diana (22m 34s):
And after a while she said, well how much longer? And he goes, oh, we have about 20 more miles. And she said, oh, I’m going home. And she, she made her way back. She’d had enough riding for the day, which I don’t blame her. And they had their first child, ch, his name was Claude Houston, but he always went by ch and he was born there in Lubbock and then they moved out to California. So about 19, 25, 26, they went out to California to find work wasn’t the full-blown depression yet, but in where they were there in Texas it was challenging to find work. So when they went out to California, that’s where my dad was born in 1927.

Diana (23m 14s):
And then Helen, the only girl was born in 1929 and I found on the census in 1930 that Charles was farming cotton at the time. and I have a picture of Ettie Bell in the cotton field with this huge bag of cotton over her shoulder. And she wasn’t very big, she was five two or five three. And so the cotton bag looks about as big as her. So I can only imagine that, you know, that hard work, her whole life probably really contributed to her rheumatic heart as well. So they kind of bounced back and forth between California and Texas a bit. Went back to Texas and Charles changed jobs often and his history talks about going all over the place trying to just make some money.

Diana (23m 59s):
And he had a really good crop in 1934. But then there was a terrible drought there in Texas and just everything dried up, I mean the crop literally just dried up, disappeared. And so at that point Charles and Ettie took the three children and they went on a covered wagon trip and went up to Oklahoma and lived off an Indian lease in Cherokee country. Wow. In a log cabin

Nicole (24m 23s):
During the depo. Huh?

Diana (24m 25s):
During the Dust bowl. And Charles’s dad, William Houston Schultz had this wagon on his property and he had taken his family on a covered wagon trip to New Mexico like in the early 19 hundreds. And Charles thought that was So fun. He wanted his children to have the chance to have a covered wagon trip. So there you go, Ettie gotta take a covered wagon trip. If you can imagine, that’d be a slow way to travel.

Nicole (24m 48s):
Well I think it was cheaper than paying for gas at that time after reading the book that you had talked about in the past, what is it? Four Winds?

Diana (24m 55s):
Four Winds, yeah.

Nicole (24m 56s):
Yeah, that, oh my goodness. It was so interesting learning about the family in the book and how they lived in Texas during the Dust Bowl and how just dust and dirt covered everything and just the cost of gas to get to California was like so expensive.

Diana (25m 12s):
Right. And when I read that book, it correlates exactly with that year, 1934, cuz in the book that’s the year that it got so bad that the heroin takes off and goes to California. And so Ettie and Charles instead went north to Oklahoma. And my dad has so many funny stories about that time cuz he was a little boy. It was a grand adventure for them, you know, taking this covered wagon trip. And he has so many funny stories. They lived through a tornado I mean, I’m sure that wasn’t funny at the time, but they lived through it and went down to the cellar and came out and all the trees were flattened and they had to go find the cows. So, and then he talked about the dust storms, how the dust would seep in through the cracks.

Diana (25m 55s):
And if you can imagine in a cabin, it would be really hard to keep the dust out. So they’d have to cover their noses and and mouths with handkerchiefs and try to keep the sand and dirt off the food they were eating. But I can imagine that was, oh must have been hard.

Nicole (26m 13s):
That must have been really hard to have so much dirt everywhere.

Diana (26m 18s):
Well it was a dirt floor, so apparently you just could test everything off onto the floor and then, you know, sweep the floor. But I’ve heard those dirt floors were so hard, it was just kind of compacted. Okay. So I can’t even imagine. But they were only there a few years. In 1937, Charles went west to California and he went with a friend to find work and then once he secured work he sent for Ettie and the children. And my dad would say I was, was just like in the book Grapes of Wrath, where they talk about loading everything into the truck and then driving on Route 66 to California. and I said that that was us. But one of the things that was beneficial for, for this family was that Charles, when he did go to California, he was able to get work cuz he’d been there previously and had some contacts there.

Diana (27m 3s):
And like in the book, four wins, the Oakies really had a challenge even finding work and were treated so poorly. Right. So Ettie and Charles did have a little bit of a leg up because of their previous time in California. So they settled in Sanger, California and then World War II happened and CH enlisted. And then Bob enlisted my dad at the end of the war. And during this time she had a nervous breakdown worrying about her sons. So sad.

Nicole (27m 31s):
Yeah, that must have been really scary. Not knowing if they were gonna come back home, especially after all they’d been through, you know, keeping the family together in those really tough times. Only to have them leave and go off to war.

Diana (27m 43s):
Right. And the young men were dying all over the place. You know, there was no guarantee that anybody was coming home. And they were both in the Pacific, they would write letters. And my dad tells the story about how my grandpa would tease her, tease Ettie, and she would ask every day if there were letters and he’d say, no, no letters. And then he’d give her the letters. So he was always a tease. So I don’t know if she liked that or not. But anyway, she, by the time the boys came home, she had recovered from the nervous breakdown, but then she was also really starting to, her heart was starting to fail and she often had to go to the hospital and had breathing problems.

Diana (28m 24s):
So she wanted to live long enough to see her grandchildren. And she did Ch and Helen married first and she got to meet each of their oldest children. And that was neat. My dad didn’t marry till later, so she missed out on meeting me. and I missed out on meeting her, but she did get to have two of her grandchildren around her at the end of her life. So I was happy to know that

Nicole (28m 47s):
I love that picture of her holding her two oldest grandchildren in 1954. She’s just got one in each charm and she’s sitting in a big comfy chair.

Diana (28m 56s):
Yeah. And you know, she must have just been so happy to have lived long enough to see them. So when I was putting together the Airtable, I, I was using my Google Drive folder to make sure I had all the sources I had digitized previously and put in there and I found her funeral program. And it was so neat to look at that again. and I had the two songs that she, I am guessing since she knew she was dying, that she had requested those songs, I would think. But one was in the Garden and the other was Will the Circle Be Unbroken? So I found those on YouTube and listened to them. And in The Garden is just this beautiful hymn. It was just really, really pretty.

Diana (29m 36s):
And then Will The Circle Be Unbroken was more of a country western song and I saw in the remembrances from, from her children and niece that she loved country western music. So I thought that was really fun that the two songs spoke to her love of God and country music. And it was fun to listen to those and think of those being played in her funeral. So I, I was always curious about what churches they went to. And Helen said that they went to the Baptist Church of Christ and Pentecostal, and she wrote in her letter to us that she said, I know she believed in God and prayers. Our friend, a Baptist preacher came to our house a lot the day before Mama died.

Diana (30m 19s):
He talked with her for a long time. So that was another neat little tidbit that I had not really picked up on before. You know, I think every time we revisit an Ancestor, maybe we learn a little bit more or think of something in a different way,

Nicole (30m 33s):
Especially when you’re gathering information from a lot of different sources and compiling it into a written work.

Diana (30m 39s):
Right. So I had a great weekend writing this blog post up and thinking about Ettie Bell and just getting to know her a little better. And I’m so grateful that you did all the work together up those stories because those really did give a lot of insight into her. That was a great project. It

Nicole (30m 59s):
Was fun. and I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for your encouragement. So it was definitely a joint project.

Diana (31m 5s):
It was. So as we wrap up this episode, I did do three tips for writing stories because I just really thought of some things as I was doing this that made this so much easier. And of course, as we’ve mentioned all through this podcast, interview, family members, having those written remembrances from Bob Helen and Christine added so much the story of her life. I had documents, you know, I had censuses and birth and death things, but it was those remembrances that brought her to life. So I would encourage anyone out there to get some interviews, however you can do it, voice recordings, videos, letters, this was just letters, phone calls. And also to, you know, get more people, not just one, try to get multiple people’s stories because everyone remembers something different.

Diana (31m 53s):
It’s amazing, different perspectives. So true. And then if you’re starting to write a story of an Ancestor for the first time and you’ve never done a timeline on them, do a timeline. You know, get your source citations in there and do a source citation for the interviews and the stories, because everybody always wants to know where this information came from. And if you’ve got it already created in a timeline with a citation when you write, you’re all ready to go. So that really helped me as I was writing this. And then finally, a big tip I have is to make sure you’ve downloaded all the documents. I had Eddie’s Tree on Ancestry and Family Search, and those were both pretty complete, but I noticed in my own Google Drive folder, I hadn’t downloaded some of the documents like some of the censuses.

Diana (32m 40s):
And so I made sure I had everything downloaded just so I have it on my own computer and I’m not relying for online trees.

Nicole (32m 48s):
Yeah, it’s nice to be able to open your folder for the Ancestor and see that you’ve taken the time to just make sure you downloaded the images for all the documentation you have of them. And it’s just a great reminder of what you’ve done and what you could do in the future if there’s things missing.

Diana (33m 1s):
Yeah. I mean we are really responsible for making sure we have all of these documents, the research within our grasp as well as uploaded. So it was just a good reminder to me to do all those different things for this Ancestor, my grandmother, who I had done quite a bit of research, but in writing I found I had a few more things I could Discover about her. So it

Nicole (33m 23s):
Was great. Well, good job writing about our, our shared Ancestor Ettie Bell Harris, and it’s always wonderful to talk about our own ancestors on the podcast. Thanks everyone for listening, and we hope you will also write about your ancestors and leave us a comment and share what you’ve been writing about and maybe join the 52 Ancestor challenge as well.

Diana (33m 43s):
All right. Have a great week everyone. Bye-Bye

Nicole (33m 46s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on amazon.com and other book sellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family locket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter@familylocket.com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each of you and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.