Friday, July 21, 2017

July 9th to 19th Heading Home

I wish I'd had a video camera on the roof of the motorhome
so you could have seen every beautiful mile driven.
After finishing the research I planned to do in the south, my original plan for this genealogy journey was to then switch to a different family line. My Vetter great grandfather George owned a saloon on 21st Street in Chicago and I wanted to go to that location and photograph whatever is there today. I also hoped to possibly find the grave his wife Katherine Newmeyer Vetter. But, at some point on the trip I realized I did not have it in me to tackle Chicago. So, after concluding my research at the Library of Virginia, it was time to head home.
Driving through Utah


I left Richmond, Virginia the morning of July 9th and arrived home midday on July 19th. I spent 2+ days in Laramie with Tia and Roy, so the travel time was eight days. The entire trip took two and a half months and during that time I:







·         Drove 9123 miles
·         Lived in a 75 square foot home for 84 days
·         Lived alone for longer than I ever have before
·         Saw 2 black bears up close
·         Heard and saw cicadas for the first time
·         Experienced a miracle when Steve Harris appeared to lead me to my 2nd great grandmother’s grave.
·         Spent time in 19 states of which 7 I’d never been in before including Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and South Carolina
·         Listened to 16 audio books that I was able to magically upload to my iPhone from my Hoopla Account at the Oakland Public Library, for free.
·         Watched 4 or 5 movies on Amazon Prime
·         Saw fireflies for the first time
·         Took 3070 photos
·         Wrote 58 blog posts including this last post.
·         Met several wonderful and generous people who helped me find what I was looking for.
·         Never felt unsafe.
·         Spent $1761 on camping fees - he per night average cost came to $25.16.
·         Never misplaced the car keys
·         Only got lost a couple of times and not for very long.
·         Made the entire trip with only one medium size mishap – the tree branch incident.

Thanks for the feedback and nice comments on the blog. I enjoyed creating it and was glad to be able to share the stories and a few photos with you.

Little Beaver State Park dam in West Virginia

Atwood Lions RV Park, Kansas 

Dusk at Atwood RV Park

A ground cover plant I've never seen anything like. It looks
like a conifer. Seen at Little Beaver campground.

Storm clouds over Cave Lake campground, Ely, Nevada

Cave Lake SP, my second to last campsite for $7

Evening light on one of the stone formations at Cave Lake

Cave Lake, Ely, Nevada

Visitor Center at Dinosaur National Monument - a place
to return to.

Driving through Utah

Still in Utah

Morrison Charcoal Ovens, 1882, Wood Canyon, Utah. Charcoal
was used by smelters to make steel.

Driving through Kansas which was still quite green. Once in
Colorado the landscape quickly shifted to being dry.

Visitor Center at New River Gorge in West Virginia - another
place to go back to

Starvation Lake, Duchesne, Utah

Sunset at Starvation Lake, Utah

My last campsite at San Pedro Reservoir, west side of
Yosemite. The next morning the campground was filled
with smoke from the fire in Mariposa County.

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

July 14th & 15th Laramie, Wyoming

Me with my best friend from College Tia and her husband Roy
Leaving Lawrence, Kansas I headed north on Highway 75 because I wanted to continue driving west on Highway 36 – a quiet, two-lane, straight road that would take me all the way through Kansas to Denver. At Denver I jogged north again to Laramie, Wyoming where my best friend from College Tia and her husband Roy Clark live.

I last visited Tia and Roy in Laramie in 1988 when they invited me to come and design their garden for their brand new home. Tia has come to California a few times in the interim so it was my turn to go visit them.

The Laramie parade was much like the Piedmont parade
with more horses
My timing was perfect because Laramie was celebrating Laramie Jubilee Days. There was a parade in the morning and a rodeo in the evening. What could be more Wyoming than a rodeo? 

In between these traditional events we just talked endlessly – just as we had in the 1970s when we were students together at UC Berkeley and lived in the Student Co-op.

I asked to be entertained by looking through Tia’s scrapbooks – each of which is a masterpiece in technique and design. Tia has developed a talent for photography that far exceeds mine, so I thoroughly enjoyed each page of every album and could have looked at more but did not want to seem greedy. We made muffins together and ate a lot of good food at home – just as we had OMG 45 years ago!
Pink tractors in Laramie???

Lots of beautiful horses

Cheyenne Lions Club entry



More beautiful horses at the rodeo

Cowgirls doing obstacle course runs in 17 seconds


Mutton riders 6 years and younger. There's a very young boy riding the sheep

All the mutton riders won trophies

July 12th Kansas City and Kansas University

A Jayhawk - the Kansas University mascot
As I headed home I planned a route that would take me to Kansas City. Dianne grew up in Kansas and attended Kansas University for her undergraduate degree, so I’ve wanted to see Kansas for many years.

The night before I arrived in Kansas Dianne told me I should visit the Country Club Plaza. At first it did not sound like my kind of place – a shopping center. I hate to shop. But Dianne assured me I’d like it and she was right. The complex of shops was built in 1922 by a forward-thinking developer who recognized how the automobile would profoundly transform shopping habits in the American consumer. He transformed 55 acres of what had been a dumping ground, hog farm and brickyard into a premier shopping complex covering 15 city blocks. It was the first master-planned suburban shopping center designed to accommodate people arriving by automobile.

All of the buildings are unified by a Spanish theme. They are linked with outdoor courtyards, tiles, art, well-maintained plantings, fountains and sculpture.
Many of the buildings in Country Club Plaza have ornate,
Spanish-style towers like this one


Over the years this entrepreneur managed to keep his dream alive even during the depression by programming events that would draw customers. These annual events became traditions and continue to draw people to the center today.

It was 93 degrees the day I was there and I overheard someone in the Visitor Center say, “it felt like 103 degrees with the humidity”, but despite the heat I enjoyed wandering through much of the plaza and even bought some things.

Next I drove another 50 miles west to Lawrence, Kansas to see KU. The main route through the campus is Jayhawk Drive – the school mascot. Each of the buildings along this drive is monumental – nearly all were historic. The street was tree-lined and the grounds immaculate. It is a beautiful campus.

One of the monumental buildings on Jayhawk Drive 

I secured a map and was able to locate the Tri-Delta House – the sorority that Dianne was a member of. The students were gone for the summer so I could not get inside but I did take several nice photos of the exterior. I stayed in Lawrence for the night at Clinton State Park. 

Tri-Delta House where Dianne lived in the sorority

More shops in Country Club Plaza

The tile and Spanish theme continues on the interiors

Well-maintained plantings and a fountain

The shops are high-end and nicely varied

Tile detail in a lobby

J.C. Nicols Memorial Fountain

This waterway along a river extends for several blocks in
downtown and includes fountains and gondola rides

This and the next two buildings on the KU campus


July 2nd - 8th The Last Four Libraries

The man for whom Dinwiddie County is named -
Robert Dinwiddie from Ronald Seagrave collection
On July 5th while in Mecklenburg County I visited the library in South Hill. They had four whole shelves of genealogy and county history books, and I was thrilled. I set up camp at a nearby table, adjusting the furniture so I could plug in my laptop for the duration. Then I started with the top row of shelf number one and worked my way through to the bottom row of shelf four. It took a couple hours or more. I checked the titles of each book and took down all that had any potential.

While on this trip I’ve been dutiful to enter sources into my Research Log. My log is an EXCEL file with separate tabs for each family name. The Pattillo tab has 151 listed sources. This is a tremendous help for avoiding looking at the same source twice. Though there are times when I do so purposely. For example, on this trip I expanded my research to include new family names. There is a comments column on my spreadsheet where I make notes of what names I look up in each reference and something about what I found, so I might have looked at Pattillo and Land in 2014 and would now check Phillips and Moseley – two maternal family names. Of course it is equally important to record references where you find nothing, so you don’t bother with those a second time.
Photo of the historic Dinwiddie courthouse from "Dinwiddie
County The Countrey of the Apamatica" compiled by the
Writers Program of the WPA

At South Hill I also expanded my county research to include Brunswick, Lunenberg and Dinwiddie Counties – all places my ancestors lived prior to migrating to Mecklenburg.  I found the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) Patriot Index, also four books on Early Wills, Early Settlers, Family Records and Bible Records all for Mecklenburg. The South Hill collection included a well-written Hutchison Family History published in 1968. I studied it briefly and decided to copy the entire 88 page book.

Several of the documents that were of interest to me were written by Katherine B. Elliott who lived in South Hill. One such book was a synopsis of Revolutionary War Records for Mecklenburg County that included one Pattillo and four Phillips relations.
I like this illustration on the inside cover of the book

When I finally finished reviewing each book I packed up and headed for the Tobacco Museum but I arrived fifteen minutes after they’d closed - darn.  Disappointed, I left South Hill and Mecklenburg County, again with some reluctance.

After driving until I was tired I sought a place to camp and found Fort Pickens RV Park. I hit the “navigation” button on my iPhone app and headed that way. When the speaker directed me towards a military base I thought something must be wrong and ignored the directions. A few miles later the same thing happened. I was a little low on gas and was too tired to chase around. There were no other campgrounds in the vicinity, so on the fourth pass I finally drove onto the Fort Pickens Military Base to ask directions to the RV Park. There the soldier at the entry gate told me, “Yes, there’s an RV park on the base. Just turn left here, right on 10th Street and you’ll see the site on your right.” It wasn’t much but it was only $11 for the night including electric and water hookups.  So, I spent the night on a military base and felt very safe.

The following day after finishing at the courthouse I checked the Dinwiddie Library. It was a sweet little building but housed only a single book of interest that I dutifully reviewed and made a few copies.
Dinwiddie Library

Next was the library in Hopewell where I hoped to find more sources for Dinwiddie County but their archive room was closed and the one woman who could unlock the door was unavailable until the following week. After checking their shelved books, I left feeling only mildly disappointed for by now I could feel myself losing steam.

July 8th Virginia Library – my last research stop.
This day I returned to the State Library of Virginia in their capital city Richmond. I did research there in 2014 but knew there was more to find so looked forward to going back and finding what I’d missed previously.  The highlight of my 2014 visit was being allowed to handle and photograph original documents, so when I arrived this time that is the first thing I headed for. I was very disappointed to learn that since 2014 all those documents have been scanned and are now available on microfilm. The thrill of holding the originals gone and the ability to make quality copies compromised. I understand why they did it but was still a disappointment.
Photo of the Boydton Courthouse from 1905 provided by
Ruth Crowder

I selected a few rolls of film and searched through them but without much enthusiasm. But my efforts paid off by producing the wills of Pettus Phillips a 4th great grandfather, Edward Pattillo a 3rd great granduncle, Curtis Land a 6th great granduncle, and wills for three Land brothers that were 4th great granduncles. I found a couple of indentures for James Pattiloe/Pattillo dated 1778 and 1779 but the real prize for the day was a Homestead document for my second great grandfather James H. Pattillo. It listed what he paid for the land including one mule, six head of cattle, one hog, farming implements valued at $5, household and kitchen furniture valued at $60 plus the entire crop of wheat on hand, and all other crops he would produce in the year 1880. I’m not sure if he got a good deal or not.

Having exhausted all that I could think to check in their microfilm collection I tackled a few books but only half-heartedly. At this point I’d been travelling and doing research intensively for 66 days and even though I knew the State Library had much more to offer I just could not bring myself to open one more book to scan the index or thread one more reel of microfilm onto a reader. I was tired of scanning, photographing and assigning names to files. I could do no more, so I left the library an hour before it closed and headed for my reserved campsite at Americamps RV Resort in Ashland, Virginia.
Colored lights and decorations at the Americamps RV Resort

As I write this, I’ve been traveling for 77 days. During the trip I’ve visited six courthouses in four states, sixteen libraries, and I made 3390 copies of pages of documents. This should keep me busy and content for a while. I’ll write another story for the CGS Blog when I have a tally of all the new ancestors I have found and will discover as I process all this new information – stay tuned. 
Winfield Scott from the Library of Congress. I
copied this because I have an ancestor named
after him

This is the Homestead document for James H. Pattillo

Illustration of a tobacco auction in Clarksville, Virginia. Mecklenburg
County was the 3rd largest producer of tobacco in the state.

One of Elliott's books. This one summarizing wills in
Mecklenburg County. This page lists Phillips ancestors

The Butler Rittenhouse family, 1905, Mecklenburg.
No relation but I wish there were because I like the photo