Posting Member: Jenn
Topic: Moving stuff around, uploading to FindAGrave, Niagara, and the case of the unknown McDowell
Family Name Associations: Agner, McDowell
Location: Comfy spot by the window 🙂
Mood: Sleepy.
Music:
There’s soooo much going on!
First off, we’re shuffling stuff around on FindAGrave. No one panic, it’s just reorganizing. But sooner or later someone was going to ask, so we’re mentioning it here.
Basically, viewers don’t see the same thing as users on the graving interface. Rather than a neat, organized interface, you just sort of throw graves up… And that’s that.
We have a list of 3500 some odd graves, related and general listings all alphabetically listed in one super long list that you can only look at by 100 names or so at a time. It isn’t conducive to actually ever finding anything or getting anything done.
Now, Ancestry could go wild and have a whole new interface put up tomorrow that’s way useful – But we’re making the executive decision to shuffle the family memorials over to the Layne profile and add all the non-relatives to the CSGS account… In hopes of making it easier for us to separate e-mail and research from unrelated graves. We tried setting it up this way once upon a time, but really the fail was mine – I forget log-in info and get a wee bit lazy. But I’m paying for my evil ways now that I have to sort through all these memorials!
We have a few hundred graves we’re working on uploading before we start on putting documentation back in the trees. We’re hoping to get a few more days of being out and about before the weather turns too… There might be a few days of sunlight left! We’d had plans to get back to King this summer that just haven’t panned out, so fingers crossed – We’ll get there.
We did have a day trip to Niagara last week – Just Mark and I for the day. I have a post with all that coming, maybe tomorrow… It depends how much work we get done tomorrow – We wanted the uploads complete first. It’s a beautiful city. More to come on all of that!
And finally, the case of who on earth ‘McDowell’ is. We really were struggling with some of the Anger line today… And it’s been going on for ages, so I thought I’d write about it in case anyone has a brilliant suggestion they want to send us!
The Agner men seem to make good use of ‘McDowell’ as a middle name in the mid 1800s. We’ve been questioning why for a while now. The most obvious use for a naming trend would be that it was one of the women’s maiden names that was used in later generations. But so far, we’ve yet to find a McDowell woman hiding in these branches.
So, Samuel McDowell Agner in 1845, George McDowell Agner in 1853, and his son William McDowell Agner are just a few of the other lines that all seem to share this middle name. But we think a few of the generation even before that had the same middle name and it’s recorded less obviously. It’s possible that Jake was on to something when he found a Revolutionary Soldier named McDowell. Maybe they all served together and the Agners’ liked their buddy so much the name was absorbed for generations? They’re such a mysterious bunch for a family that’s been around so long on American soil. Jake will be continuing to poke around in that tree – Don’t be shy if you have some ideas for him.
