Doctor Grandma

My younger brother’s birthday. Need to buy a card & mail it yet today. I don’t like e-cards, somehow too impersonal for a birthday. They vanish into thin air. Maybe because my grandmother on my mom’s side saved every card she ever got, and in fact I still have some of those in boxes, I cannot bring myself to send e-cards.

Al got his new computer in the mail today so he will soon be working.

Still stuck on James Agnew. I think he was married twice. He shows up in the New Albany census in 1870 married to “Mary C.” with 2 children, Anna and Clith(?). Then he is listed as marrying Carrie Bybee in 1879, which is the union my grandfather & his twin sister came out of, as they were born in 1892 — later children in this marriage. Unless there were 2 James Agnews in New Albany, both saying they were born in Ohio, they are the same guy. One answer would be to see the New Albany city directory or phone books of the era.

However, James Agnew’s birth place remains unsettled. He says he was born in Ohio. There was a William Agnew near Cincinnati, who has a son names James around 1841, when my great-grandfather James was born in Ohio. But how do I validate that these are the same person? I have to find something on *my* James Agnew that lists his parents. Marriage certificate *might* do it, if they were still alive & if it lists the groom’s parents.

I was going to put a quote from the Baha’i writings in some of my posts, just because the Baha’i writings are uplifting and beautiful. I have none for this post, but will just post one from something I read last night:

“Would that pure and stainless hearts could be found, that I might impart unto them a sprinkling from the ocean of knowledge which My Lord hath bestowed upon Me, so that they may soar into the heavens even as they walk upon the earth and speed over the waters even as they course the land, and that they may take up their souls in their hands and lay them down in the path of their Creator.” — Baha’u’llah, “Gems of Divine Mysteries.”

I am blown away. Signed up to ancestry.com and started my summer project of researching the family tree. It is 3:15am! I am in awe of what I have found in the past few hours. Census records, death dates, some name changes, siblings of my grandfather. I learned my great-grandfather Agnew’s wife was 18 years his junior, and she had 6 children, 5 of whom lived, one of whom was my grandfather and he had a twin sister. Her name was Myrtle and according to the census records, she had a baby boy at age 14 and named him after her father. Family history is really weird.

James Agnew, my great-grandfather, said in the 1880 census that both his parents were born in England. Then in the1900 census he reported that his father was born in Virginia and his mother in Germany! What was he doing, being a disgruntled old man and making up stories? I know nothing of his parents– not their names, nothing. This doesn’t help. Oh, I’m going to enjoy this search!