Archive for August, 2011

unemployment

August 5, 2011

My husband is unemployed. Though he got employee of the month twice in the past 6 mos., he was laid off. He was a remote recruiter for a medical management program at a university in Missouri. New management decided to do away with all remote employees. And that, as they say, was that.

We live in SC. Filing for unemployment here in SC, where he worked from home and paid South Carolina state taxes, they say the university never paid any money into SC unemployment. This is not surprising, since they only had one employee who worked from home in South Carolina: my husband. However, it is not our fault, and we should not have to suffer, due to their negligence or ignorance or ineptitude in handling THEIR financial affairs. Of course, that is not how things work. We are suffering, because neither South Carolina nor Missouri will take the responsible step, and give us an unemployment check.

We do not have the ability to wait it out while they fight over who pays the unemployment check to ONE employee who happened to work from home in one state for a university in another. This is the technological age, the 21st century. He is not the ONE SOLITARY EMPLOYEE who worked remotely from home this past 2 years. But we are dealing with the government and bureaucracy of the state of South Carolina.

At this point, he has been without work for 6 weeks, and there is no unemployment check in sight, while they do an “investigation” of his employment at said university. We are letting our bills accumulate to being 2 months due, and then things will begin getting shut off. Thank you, great country and state, for looking out for the working guy, for putting people first, for caring.

I am saying my prayers and begging God for money. Yup, no qualms here. All I want to do is pay my bills. I figure God knows that. There is one job prospect in the near future and if it works out, we may expect a paycheck in, oh, let’s say a month. But that is only a hope at this point. So what we have right now, is a hope & a prayer.

Grandpa’s Thanksgiving prayer

August 3, 2011

My grandpa George Plantenga always said the Lord’s prayer memorized, faster than anyone I’ve ever heard say it. He had one other prayer, which he said at Thanksgiving. I just found a copy of it. He never read these, he said them from memory.
 
Oh mighty God and Heavenly Father,
again we draw nigh unto Thee
on this noon hour this Thanksgiving Day,
We thank Thee for the many bountiful blessings granted unto us,
We thank Thee that Thou hast prepared us for the life given unto us,
the health and strength to accomplish our daily tasks of life.
We pray that Thou will bless the food which has been prepared for us,
and that Thou will lead, guide and direct us,
and forgiveth our sins.
We ask it in Jesus’ name,
Amen.

Mary Reid Agnew family history

August 3, 2011
My dad’s mom, Mary (Reid) Agnew, grew up in Bedford Indiana. We went there on the way home Tuesday. It is a beautiful spot in southern Indiana with beautiful, rolling green hills and valleys. She grew up on some farmland somewhere around Bedford, with her sister Margaret and brother “Noyes”. Yes, that was his name, Noyes. Funny. We found the gravesite of:
her father’s mother’s parents.
 
Mary Reid’s father was Charles Reid & her mother was Cora Belle Owens.
 
Charles’ parents were: Alexander Reid and Nancy Jane Smith.
 
Nancy Smith’s parents were Peter Smith and Margaret Ford Smith. Peter was born in 1793 in Rowan, North Carolina (!) and he died in 1848 in Bedford, Indiana.
 
Margaret, his wife, was said to have been born in Tennessee and died in Bedford, Indiana. No idea on the rest of their life stories, BUT! The interesting thing is:
 
Their gravesite was a big huge monument! So they must’ve had money.
 
So it was Peter and Margaret’s graves that we found, in the form of a big monument. True to form, my camera ran out of battery JUST AS I GOT THERE, so we took a picture on Dad’s phone, which has an excellent camera. Now I have to figure out how to get the picture off the phone and into the computer. The monument was about 8 feet tall.
 
It is amazing to me just how much of my family history is southern Indiana. On both the Agnew side and my Grandma Reid side (who married my Grandpa John Agnew) we are in Southern Indiana since before the Civil War. In Peter Smith’s case, I have no idea when they arrived in Indiana. That’s a next-step to research. In James Agnew’s case, my great grandfather, all I know is he somehow arrived there in the 1860s (probably coming down the Ohio river from Cincinnati). He was a painter; my grandpa John Wesley Agnew was a Monon RR man. Peter Smith, I don’t know yet. Probably a land owner.
 
LASTLY, I FOUND A LOVELY PICTURE OF MARY REID AGNEW as a child at her older sister, Margaret’s wedding, AND a WONDERFUL  photo of Mary & Margaret’s parents, Charles and Cora Reid, in a family history book done by Margaret Reid’s children. Margaret, my grandma Mary’s sister, married into the LEECH family. This book is a history of the LEECH family, and coincidently, contains their mother’s REID family.