RLP 396: Visiting My Love County, Oklahoma, Roots

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, Episode 396, Love County Oklahoma: walking in the footsteps of Richard and Nancy Frazier. 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 genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at 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 (42s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hello, welcome to Research Like a Pro today. Hi mom.

Diana (51s):
Hi Nicole. How is it going today?

Nicole (54s):
It’s going well. I’ve been transcribing land patents and I ordered the application for a preemption land. I don’t know what to call it, but it was a preemption one. So I’m hoping there’ll be some witness statements in the application file.

Diana (1m 9s):
Oh, that’s so fun to get those. What year was it?

Nicole (1m 12s):
In the 1840s.

Diana (1m 15s):
That might be good. My Thomas B Royston’s preemption had two witness statements, as you remember, that were just the same, that were good. So that’s exciting. It’s always so fun to get those back and I think even if they don’t have witness statements, you get receipts and you get the actual application documents, which is really great.

Nicole (1m 37s):
Yeah, I think it’ll be neat. I ordered that yesterday for my 14 Day Challenge project on Alexander Keaton and if he’s the son of Ephrim Keaton.

Diana (1m 46s):
Very nice. Well, speaking of 14 Day Challenge, I’ve been working on mine as well and I had a fun objective and that was to discover something about Samuel Daniel who was the man who placed the advertisement for John Royston Runaway Apprentice in 1770. So I just found a day or two ago and I, I’m excited to get back to the research, a run of court records between Samuel Daniel and Richard Wyatt Royston and John Royston. So this was a couple years after and I have not got everything transcribed and in order, so I’m excited to get all the records and then to start putting together the pieces of the puzzle here.

Diana (2m 32s):
So,

Nicole (2m 32s):
oh my gosh,

Diana (2m 33s):
so fun.

Nicole (2m 34s):
So you hadn’t seen these court records ’cause they’re in the county where Samuel Daniel lived.

Diana (2m 39s):
Right, they’re in Middlesex County. Gloucester County where the Roystons lived, had severe record loss, so there are no records for this era, but Middlesex didn’t have any record loss because apparently the clerk went and hid them, you know, when there was the British were coming or or whatever situation. So there’s plenty of records and full text search found a ton on Samuel Daniels, so I’m not going to look at all of them. I’m just going to focus in on the Roystons and him, you know.

Nicole (3m 11s):
Well, perfect. I mean that is just such a great poster child story for FAN club research.

Diana (3m 19s):
It is. Absolutely. I could have done this years ago if I had thought about it, but I never thought about it, so I’m excited and I did find that his, the vestry book there for the parish, it was called Christ Church Parish, there in Middlesex County and they have a lot of records. So there was a birth record for Samuel Daniel, I believe it was 1720s, which puts him, you know, makes it so that he would’ve been in a, his probably early forties, late thirties when he placed that advertisement

Nicole (3m 52s):
Hmm.

Diana (3m 52s):
for apprentice John Royston, which makes sense, you know?

Nicole (3m 56s):
Yeah.

Diana (3m 56s):
Just right in the prime of his working years. And there was only one Samuel Daniel that I’ve been able to see. So I think I’ve identified the correct person.

Nicole (4m 5s):
That’s convenient!

Diana (4m 6s):
That there weren’t a whole bunch, there’s a lot of Daniels in the county, so this family’s been there for a long time, but only one Samuel that I can tell. So we’ll see.

Nicole (4m 19s):
I love this project. How fun.

Diana (4m 21s):
Kind of fun to just go venture off and do something totally different, isn’t it? And I love that for these 14 day challenges, something a little bit smaller than breaking through your brick wall. You know, something that you haven’t researched before so you actually can find a lot of fun interesting records because you haven’t exhausted them all already. So I like it. I’m having fun.

Nicole (4m 43s):
FAN club research has never been easier. Now that full text search makes it so easy to just find these kind of court records and things that we may not have ever been able to find before.

Diana (4m 55s):
Yes, absolutely.

Nicole (4m 57s):
Well, I know you didn’t have two Samuel Daniels, but if you had, you would’ve been a good candidate for the Merging and Separating Identities course. I know many of you out there have that problem. Let me tell you more about the course. This is part of our Research Like a Pro institute and imagine finally proving which of four possible fathers belongs to your ancestor after years of being stuck. That’s what genealogist participants learned to do in Jan Joyce’s course, Merging and Separating Identities. This isn’t your typical Genealogy Institute course. Over a multi-week course, you’ll tackle the field’s toughest challenge: distinguishing between people who share names, places, or both.

Nicole (5m 39s):
Jan has a great team of expert instructors, Kristin Britek, myself, Nicole Dyer, Patty Hobbes, Lynn Nelson and Kim Richardson. Together they bring decades of experience in solving complex identity cases. You’ll master identity dossier that organize every piece of evidence, learn when to merge records and when to separate them, and discover correlation techniques that reveal hidden connections. Work through real world case studies, including DNA strategies, mapping tools, and even AI applications. Plus, you’ll practice on a specially curated data set with expert guidance every step of the way. Spots will fill up fast for this unique course. Visit the FamilyLocket website and click on shop then Institute Courses to learn more and register for this dynamic Merging and Separating Identities course and finally break through those identity roadblocks.

Nicole (6m 30s):
This course will be on Thursdays from April 30th through June 11th at 9:00 AM to 2:30 PM each Thursday. So we’re really looking forward to that and it’s such a needed course for anyone struggling with how to manage and track those challenging identity cases. Also coming up is our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series for February. And the webinar for that month is going to be by Sunni Mohammadbhoy. And Sunni is such a wonderful researcher. She has been in our Research Like a Pro with DNA study group and she’s going to be presenting something that she worked on in the study group called From Georgia to Florida: Reconstructing the Family of Seth Howard Through DNA and Historical Evidence.

Nicole (7m 16s):
Seth Howard was born about 1804 in Georgia and migrated to the Territory of Florida in 1816. He is a registered “Florida Pioneer” with the Florida Genealogical Society. He is well-researched by professional genealogists and his numerous descendants, yet the identity of his parents has never been discovered. Thorough analysis of the documentary evidence gathered from his adult life seemed to yield no clues to his parentage. This case study uses atDNA cluster analysis along with pedigree triangulation as a lead toward possibly identifying his parents. Additional correlation of documentary evidence, geographical and historical context, and onomastic clues provides a compelling circumstantial case to support the report’s conclusion and Sunni will use a variety of tools including DNA Gedcom, clustering, BanyanDNA, she’ll talk about pedigree collapse, pedigree triangulation, Georgia Land Lotteries, the Patriot War, Frontier Migration, tax records and so forth.

Nicole (8m 9s):
This is going to be a wonderful lecture and we hope you can join us. You can still register for the 2026 webinar series at any time throughout the year and that will give you access to each monthly lecture. So we’re excited. Our next study group will begin in August of 2026. And so if you’re thinking of joining us, that will be the Research Like a Pro study group and peer group leader applications will be accepted on our website if you’d like to join us and receive complimentary registration. Also, don’t forget to join our newsletter it comes out every Monday and you get new content from us, from our videos, posts, podcast episodes and things like that.

Nicole (8m 54s):
We hope we’ll see many of you at RootsTech on March 5th through 7th in Salt Lake City. We’re both giving classes and we’ll have an exhibitor booth, so we’re looking forward to seeing you there. And we’ll each be having one of our classes be online as well, so if you can’t go in person, you’ll be able to see one of the classes online.

Diana (9m 11s):
Right. I’m so excited for RootsTech, it’s always fun. Such a great vibe there for anyone who has never been. You just have to go at least once to try it out. It’s so fun and I’m glad that we’re going to have some lectures online. That will be awesome. My Negative Evidence one will be recorded and yours is DNA and AI, if I am thinking correctly. Yep. Is that right?

Nicole (9m 34s):
That’s right.

Diana (9m 35s):
That’s gonna be awesome. Well let’s get to our topic of the day, which is talking all about visiting Love county Oklahoma Roots. So Nicole, you went there in May, I believe, was it May of last year and I went in September?

Nicole (9m 56s):
Actually I went in May of 2024.

Diana (9m 58s):
Oh my goodness. So you’d gone a whole year before me. That’s funny. The years go by, don’t they? So I was excited to get to go and visit some of the same places that you did. You know, we have these paternal lines that were all in Texas in the mid 1800s and they all moved north to Indian Territory by 1900. And even though I had researched them all for 23 years and studied the records and histories and photographs, I really just wanted to go and and see the land. I wanted to go where they lived. And so I was able to walk in the cemetery and visit the historical museum and drive through the countryside.

Diana (10m 38s):
And it really makes a difference, you know, if you’ve been there and you can picture it when you’re looking at the records and thinking about their lives. So it was just a neat experience. Well my second great grandparents, Richard and Nancy Frazier were in the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas from the time they were born until they left McDonald County, Missouri for Texas, between 1876 and 1880. They had lived through the Civil War there in Missouri, which was awful. And Richard was a teamster for the Confederacy in Marmaduke’s division for about four years.

Diana (11m 18s):
And although the 1863 courthouse was burned and destroyed their marriage record, Nancy many, many years later stated they were married in October of 1863, and that was on her widow’s pension. Well 1863 as you know, was the height of the Civil War. And in studying the Ozarks in the Civil War, I learned it was terrible gorilla warfare, people basically fighting with their neighbors. Everything was in such an uproar. So following the war, Nancy and Richard Frazier lived there for a little bit through reconstruction in McDonald County.

Diana (11m 60s):
But they finally moved west to Cook County, Texas by 1880. And when settlers started moving north to Indian Territory just a little bit after that, in the 1880s and 1890s, Richard and Nancy with their large family of many, many children crossed the Red River from Texas into the Chickasaw Nation. And they settled in Burneyville by about 1892. And I had always wondered when they went, because we’re missing the 1890 census and in 1880 they’re in Texas 1900 they’re in Indian Territory. When did they move? But luckily Nancy had stated in that pension in 1915 that she submitted that she had been in the country, meaning there in Oklahoma for 23 years and Richard had been a farmer.

Diana (12m 49s):
He farmed until his death in 1911 and then she lived another 13 years and died in 1924. She is one of our ancestors out of this Texas bunch who actually has a photo and I love the photo of her. We actually have a couple photos of her. One is, I am thinking it’s about 1915 and she’s in this long black dress. It was definitely not stylish. So she’s much older here and it was probably the style back in the 1880s or something. And I’ve wondered even if it was taken on the day of her husband’s funeral, maybe like when he died at the cemetery, you know, we just don’t know for sure.

Diana (13m 36s):
I thought maybe she was in mourning because it sort of looks like that and it’s a very conservative style, but it fits with the era and her role as the matriarch of the family, which you know, could be the reason for the photo. Now let’s have a word from our Sponsor. Have you hit a brick wall in your family tree research? While census records provide important details, they often don’t tell a full story. That’s where Newspapers.com comes in. With over a billion pages of historical newspapers It offers a treasure trove of stories that bring your ancestors lives into sharper focus. Imagine covering an obituary that lists every surviving family member, an article about your great-grandfather’s championship bowling league, or even a rare photograph you’ve never seen before.

Diana (14m 24s):
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Nicole (14m 52s):
Wow. I’m just looking at the picture of Nancy Briscoe Frazier and thinking about what you said, that she could have been mourning and you know she is wearing that black dress, or it looks dark at least in the black and white or sepia photo. But there does seem to be like maybe a cross in the background there. I don’t know if that’s just accidental or there’s definitely a barbed wire fence so she could just be on her land, but maybe that’s the fence surrounding the cemetery. I thought that was an a good guess that maybe she is at the cemetery.

Diana (15m 24s):
I agree that does look like a cross.

Nicole (15m 27s):
They have a lot of those Woodmen of the World memorials at the cemetery and one of those pieces of wood in the background looks like it could be the same shape. I wonder, who knows, maybe she’s on her land, but I loved what you said about her dress not being stylish. It’s a loosely, I would say, an unfitted dress with like a collar very matronly looking.

Diana (15m 51s):
Absolutely. Especially for 1915, right?

Nicole (15m 54s):
Yes. She was definitely elderly at the time, so…

Diana (15m 57s):
I think you’re right.

Nicole (15m 59s):
going more for comfort than anything else.

Diana (16m 1s):
I think that is a Woodmen of the World back there ’cause it has that unique angle at the top.

Nicole (16m 8s):
Right.

Diana (16m 9s):
That is so interesting. That very well could be the cemetery that we visited over a hundred years later.

Nicole (16m 16s):
It is pretty intriguing to think about that possibility. And why else would she have a photo taken by herself? It is interesting to think about that because there is another photo of her with her grandchildren and she has her rocking chair and she’s wearing, I don’t know, do you think that’s the same dress? It has a collar, it looks different. No, it’s a different dress. She’s wearing a little bit of a nicer dress, I would say in the one with her grandchildren, but, but yeah, it makes you wonder like what was the occasion of this photo of her by herself in a field?

Diana (16m 54s):
I agreed. I think she looks older there too than in the one with the grandchildren.

Nicole (17m 0s):
True. Yeah.

Diana (17m 2s):
Maybe they just took it a little bit later in her life. We don’t know. I you just can only guess, right? But I guess it was maybe between 1910 and 1924, which is a big span, but I don’t know, maybe further research and looking at other cemetery photos could help to figure that out. Its an idea.

Nicole (17m 24s):
Yeah. Well I put the photo in ChatGPT and said, analyze this photo and it’s, it couldn’t tell if it was a a man or a woman in the picture, I thought that was kind of strange because obviously wearing a dress.

Diana (17m 37s):
Yeah.

Nicole (17m 38s):
But it did say that the time of year looks like very dry and So it could be late summer to early fall because the vegetation looks dry and that’s kind of true.

Diana (17m 48s):
Yes it is. That is true.

Nicole (17m 51s):
It’s something to consider also is the time of year that the photo was taken and we could look and see, you know, when Richard Frazier died, if that was in the fall or when it was. I guess we’ll talk about that now. So talking more about the cemetery, well I loved visiting the Burneyville Cemetery, I’m glad that you got to go too. So let’s give our listeners some background on this. The Burneyville Cemetery is one cemetery within Love County, Oklahoma. And it’s the final resting place for Richard Frazier and Nancy (Briscoe) Frazier as well as as two of their children, Colon and Edmond Thomas Frazier, and many of their 11 children and numerous grandchildren lived nearby during the early 1900s.

Nicole (18m 34s):
In our very favorite photo of Nancy, she’s pictured with two of her grandchildren, ettie Belle Harris, she’s my great great grandmother, and Bert Harris, Ettie’s brother. And their mother, Alice Frazier, was one of the youngest Frazier children. So this photo may have been taken at the time of Richard Frazier’s death in 1911. Bert would’ve been six and Ettie would’ve been four. And Richard and Nancy’s headstones in the Burneyville Cemetery reveal more about them. Nancy’s reads, “Mother, Nancy Frazier, February 15th, 1847 to January 30th, 1924.

Nicole (19m 18s):
She was the sunshine of our home.” So that was a nice tombstone. So Nancy’s headstone was likely erected much later than 1924 by her children, likely at the same time as her sons’, which are in the same style, so Edmund Thomas and Colon Frazier, their headstones are also there now. Richard’s headstone is older and it was likely erected at the time of his death in 1911. It reads, “R Frazier born March 12th, 1840, died January 13th, 1911. The best, the dearest favorite of the sky must taste that cup for a man is born to die.”

Nicole (20m 2s):
So it’s neat that they each had a little saying at the bottom of their headstone. Then on his headstone, the symbols of the open gate, dove, and rays of light are Christian imagery depicting the deceased soul being welcomed into heaven and passing through pearly gates. The poem and the symbols were very common in the early 20th century for headstones.

Diana (20m 27s):
Yeah, it’s always fun to look at the symbols and the lettering, the phrasing. It gives you such insight into this family. And so it makes you realize that for one thing, that they were religious, putting that on there must not have, would not have been inexpensive, you know, that was important to have that symbol of the open gate, dove, and ray of light. And I, I just love the little phrases that they put there on both of them. It’s just so neat. So yeah, it was great visiting that cemetery and I was so happy to see that it was well kept, you know, that grass was cut, it was kind of wet and soggy, you know, they get a lot of rain there and so my shoes did get all muddy but there was grass in between.

Diana (21m 15s):
So it was fun and beautiful trees, out, very rural. I imagine it’s looked that way for a hundred years. You know, probably not as well kept up with the grass though, you know, back in the day when it was probably harder to mow the lawn. It was fun.

Nicole (21m 30s):
Yeah. And I thought that was such good insight about Nancy’s headstone being in the style of her sons and therefore not being placed at 19, 1924, but much later. So that was really good to notice that and to think about this looks like a much more modern headstone. Like it was probably placed in the 1950s.

Diana (21m 49s):
Well, and looking at the death date of those two Frazier boys, one died 1963 and one 1952, so I’m even guessing 1960s, you know, at the time of the 1963 death of Edmund, maybe that point, at that point they said, okay, let’s, let’s get headstones for everybody because not only is the style the same, the lettering, the Frazier name is exactly the same. It’s all capitals and it’s special letters. I can’t even think of how to describe that for our listeners.

Nicole (22m 21s):
It’s outlined.

Diana (22m 22s):
Outlined, yeah, it’s outlined. It’s the same lettering style. And Nancy got a little special stuff ’cause hers says mother and hers has the, she was the sunshine of our home phrase, whereas the two sons only say at rest. So yeah, I think I’m guessing, you know, 1963, 1964 was when they erected those, which makes sense.

Nicole (22m 44s):
Oh you know what, that makes sense, and it could have been later even because I just realized that our, our John C Harris is buried there and his headstone completely broke and is illegible now and I wanna put a new headstone there for him. And so it would probably look like that. It would be very modern looking. So these could be ones that have been recently placed because of, we know that at that time period they were doing kind of these like thin concrete obelisks that were prone to breaking in the 1910s. Like when John C Harris died, it was 1918. And so if that was the style they were doing when when Nancy died, she probably had that and then it broke and then they replaced it.

Diana (23m 28s):
That probably is right. Yeah, we’re lucky that her husband’s Richard Frazier’s still exists because that was early and I think that’s probably placed about that era in 1911 be there’s a lot of, what do you call it, moss

Nicole (23m 46s):
marble?

Diana (23m 47s):
Well it’s marble and then there’s, you know, you can just tell it’s old, it’s kind of aged. So that one seems like it is likely more original.

Nicole (23m 55s):
Oh yeah, that looks original. And they had several like that in the cemetery that were marble. And that seems to have, they seemed to have stood the test of time. I think there was an economic depression in the 1910s, in the latter end. And after researching the Harris’ in that time period and seeing John C Harris’ son Dock, your second great grandfather, Dock Harris’s fortunes dipped so low at the end of the 1910s decade that I feel like there wasn’t money at that time, especially with World War I. And World War I is what prompted a lot of the recession for farmers because of the uncertainty of being able to sell their grains and whatnot that they’re farming, but then also the influenza epidemic.

Nicole (24m 40s):
And so people dying after like World War I and that in the next five, 10 years, there just maybe wasn’t money to pay for a nicer headstone. So they, you know, maybe had these more concrete, less expensive headstones that didn’t last.

Diana (24m 54s):
That’s a good point. That’s a good point. So maybe Nancy’s was, was there by Richard’s, but it didn’t last and so they decided to replace it with a, a modern one. That’s a really good point and that’s a good lesson about thinking about context and economics because it’s not cheap to erect a headstone.

Nicole (25m 13s):
So true. Especially, I mean, Richard Frazier’s is tall, I mean it’s almost as tall as like my 10-year-old. So it’s not a small headstone, it’s like a, what do you call that? I wouldn’t say it’s an obelisk, but it’s definitely a, larger…

Diana (25m 29s):
yeah, yeah. Stands probably two or three feet tall. Yeah. So I think that the, that shows that the family at that time had money to do that and there were a lot of children and so perhaps they pooled their money and were able to pay for it.

Nicole (25m 44s):
It was a time of prosperity in the early 1900s there. A lot of people were buying land. Around that time is when Dock Harris bought a lot of land from the Chickasaw Nation. But sadly towards the end of that decade he had to sell it all. But anyway, so Dock Harris married Alice Frazier and that’s the connection between the Fraziers and the Harrises. So both of that couple’s parents are buried here except for Dock’s mother was buried back in Texas because she died in childbirth. But Dock’s father, John C Harris is also in that cemetery and we need to get him a new headstone. And I will say that the, the Burneyville Cemetery is very well kept up by the people who live in the county there because it is really in the middle of nowhere.

Nicole (26m 34s):
The town of Burneyville is very tiny. So they didn’t have such a good group of the community coming to clean it every year they have an annual cleaning event. If they didn’t have that, it would be completely overgrown, you know, with weeds and grass and stuff. And so they really do a good job with taking care of that cemetery in their county.

Diana (26m 56s):
Absolutely, yes. And it was nice for me because to find those, you had taken pictures of them with your phone and uploaded those to Google photos, I believe. And so I had the coordinates and I could use my phone to just take me there and it would be off sometimes by a couple of rows, but it got me in the general area. So that was really nice. And then also I had a map of the cemetery that someone had sent us years ago where they had mapped out all the family’s graves and that was really helpful. So you know, if you, one of you listeners knows where all the, the people are buried in the cemetery draw a map. That’s amazing to have that for people that want to go find them because we’ve all wandered cemeteries looking for headstones and it’s great if you’ve got some, some guidance somehow.

Nicole (27m 45s):
Yeah. And there are some great technology tools to help with this. You can put those coordinates right into Find a Grave, which I have done. And then if you use Billion Graves that is built in directly to the app to have the coordinates there to tag like it’s within the picture, it’s embedded in the photo. So Billion Graves, Find a Grave, and my husband’s uncle, he visited a cemetery in Colorado where a bunch of the Dyers are buried and he created a spreadsheet that has all the rows and the numbers and where people are buried and, and it’s really great because I have done research and, and work on Barsheba Tharp Dyer and never realized that she supposedly was buried in that cemetery according to some of the records he was working from that I didn’t have access to.

Nicole (28m 32s):
So when he shared that, I found out where Barsheba Tharp was buried.

Diana (28m 37s):
Oh my goodness. That’s so fun.

Nicole (28m 37s):
She has no headstone. There’s no headstone there for her. But it clearly says in the records that she was buried in the plot owned by her son, John James Dyer.

Diana (28m 47s):
That’s neat. So that’s cool. That is neat. Well, let’s shift focus a bit here and talk about the Love County Historical Society Pioneer Museum. And we love museums and these local museums are so amazing for learning about what life was really like in our ancestors’ day. So this museum is such a good example of what it could be, you know, if someone’s just starting a museum. I loved that they had replicas of so many different things like the ferry that was running to cross the Red River between Oklahoma and Texas. I didn’t grow up in this area and so a lot of these things were not familiar to me at all.

Diana (29m 31s):
And I loved that there was a little replica of Tuck’s Ferry and there was a newspaper display with articles about the Ferry crossing. And I took pictures of all that. I was so interested in that because obviously all of my ancestors had to cross that river to get up to Indian Territory and they would’ve all used a Ferry to load on the wagon and the horses and, and everything they had. So I learned a little bit more about it. The Frazier family, as I had figured out from the pension, was that they across the Red River and they had been living in Cook County, Texas, which was across the border, and they would’ve moved up about 1892 and would’ve used one of these ferries.

Diana (30m 17s):
There were actually lots of different ferries that people operated, it was their living, you know, they made money from that. And I learned a little bit about the Tuck Ferry and it could have been the very one used by the Frazier family because it was right there where they would’ve come up into Love County. So this early transportation was benefited by having so many ferries that operated across the Red River, connecting the future Love county with markets in Texas. And one of the early operators was a John Martin Tuck who owned a Ferry located eight miles southeast of Marietta. So that seemed like a likely Ferry. We’ll never know for sure.

Diana (30m 57s):
But it was really fun to look at the replica and think about it. So while they, while I was at the museum, I was so happy to be able to spend some time with the curator Laquitta, and she is the driving force behind that museum. She’s gathered pioneer items and had a whole research room full of information about the families of Love County. She showed me a scrapbook of obituaries and I scanned through that and I found one for Colon Frazier, Nancy’s son, one of the ones we talked about his headstone. He died in 1952. So she had amazing records that she had collected or people had given to her.

Diana (31m 38s):
I could have spent all day. And I think you did spend a lot of time in the museum, didn’t you, Nicole, when you were there?

Nicole (31m 45s):
I did, and I wish I would’ve had more time to spend there. It was just full of delightful things and original photos, old records, and so much of it was relevant to my Harris research project that I was doing for my kinship determination project, for my certification portfolio. And so I was just taking pictures of everything and she had some pictures of Ettie Belle Harris even. It was so fun. It was like, how do you have these pictures? And she had gathered, she had just gone around gathering photos from people for the museum and it just seems like the county had really supported the, her efforts over the years. And there were a lot of people that were contributors who like would subscribe to her, would subscribe to like a newsletter that she made and then they would donate money monthly and stuff to, to help with gathering items and maintaining things and getting a nicer place.

Nicole (32m 36s):
They used to be in like a train depot and then they got a newer, they were able to build a newer building. And so the museum was just a really fascinating place. She had gathered some really cool old volumes, like a jail admission volume, which actually had our ancestor in it, Dock Harris, because he had been transporting liquor, which Oklahoma was a dry state when it was first formed, and so it wasn’t allowed to have alcohol and he had some alcohol and so he went to Bri, jail, for a couple days. So that was kind of a funny thing to find I wasn’t expecting, didn’t really know at the time when I saw that about, you know, Oklahoma being a dry state for the first several years.

Nicole (33m 18s):
So it was definitely a lesson in history for me.

Diana (33m 21s):
Well, I agree, and it’s just amazing to find your ancestors in things like that. That was so fun. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I took lots of pictures and wandered around and looked through books and spent time with Laquitta. I’m just so appreciative of people that this becomes their life work, that they devote their time and all their energy into creating resources like this. So if you know any of our listeners, if you are visiting someplace where your ancestors lived, be sure and check it out and see if there is a museum there that could at least give you a feel for what it was like. I know I’ve talked before about visiting the Cassia County Idaho Historical Museum and I grew up there, but for me, even going back and going through it, I learned things.

Diana (34m 12s):
And so there’s just nothing like a museum to help you learn about your ancestors, so fun.

Nicole (34m 18s):
So great. Well thanks everyone for listening. We hope you have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

Diana (34m 25s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (34m 24s):
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 booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.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 at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.