Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Do You Have a Digital Genealogy Library?

 From Randy Seaver's series Saturday Night Genealogy Fun comes these two prompts:

1)  Do you have a digital genealogy library? If so, what titles are in it. If not, why not?

2) Tell us about your digital genealogy library in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook Status  post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

 

As a former librarian, I am ashamed to say that I had not thought in terms of "digital genealogy library."  I have this and that and the other thing scattered throughout the subdirectories of my Genealogy directory on my computer.  Some old books that had been digitized, mainly having to do with early New England settlers, of which my paternal eighth great-grandfather was one.  Lots of tipsheets and "Quick Sheets."  Some articles and other miscellania.  I haven't organized it into a separate "library" of any sort.

I suppose that could be a project, but I have at least three rather large projects in the works for 2025.  

As to specific titles, I have a transcription of A History of North Bridgewater, being a history of the area in which my eighth great-grandfather lived in Massachusetts in the 1600s, published in 1866.  I have a digitized copy of Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, published in 1891.  This work has several pages of enlistees and officers with the surname Packard, my paternal surname, including my fourth great-grandfather Richards Packard (who is listed as Richard).  I have some parts of other publications, such as the Massachusetts Tax Valuation from the 1790s, mentioning some of my paternal kin, including one whose landlord was Elbridge Gerry, to whom we give credit (or condemnation) for the invention of the gerrymander.

I have parts of other works, such as some pages from a work called By the Mark 20, which is a "mug book" of my father's class at the U.S. Naval Academy, that of 1934.  The book was published in 1954, hence the title, and is a compendium of the lives of the class members since graduation.  Later on, I was able finally -- after 60+ years of searching -- to acquire an actual copy of the book.

I don't think much in terms of digital publications.  I have a Kindle which I hardly use.  My preference, even when doing research, is to curl up on the couch with our cat and a cup of coffee and read or research in a real book, with a legal pad and pen for note-taking.  I suppose I could update my thinking.  But that will have to wait as I work on my projects that are staring me in the face in 2025.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2025: Week 2 - Favorite Photo

 This is the second week of 2025, and we who are following Amy Johnson Crow's blog prompts in her series 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks post and blog about a favorite family photograph.  Here is mine:

 This is my father, Arden Packard, USN, and his Corsair aircraft at Naval Air Station Miami (Florida) in 1941.  Daddy enlisted in the Navy in 1929, right out of high school [1].  He was in training at the Naval Training Center in San Diego, California, and was enumerated there in the 1930 census [2].  He took a competitive exam and gained admission to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland [3].  In 1937, he reported aboard Naval Air Station Pensacola (Florida) for flight training [4].  There he pursued another passion, as it was in Pensacola that he met and married my mother [5].

He had been medically retired from the Navy in 6 February 1941 [6].  He was recalled to active duty 3 October 1941 [7].  I have to think that if the Navy was recalling broken-down old pilots, there was something brewing.  

Because of some surgery he had had, he was effectively grounded. [8].  This photo was taken not long before he was grounded.  Even at that, he was rated in one of his fitness reports as being in the top 10% of naval aviators in his proficiency as an aviator.  On this same fitness report, my father is shown as having completed some 432 flight hours as a flight instructor [9].

I love this photo because my dad loved flying, as indicated by the big grin on his face in the photo.  In high school, he was a member of the Aero Club, and his father once arranged for him and his fellow club members to enjoy a flight in a commercial airplane [10].

He flew in the days before military jet aircraft.  In those days, military pilots wore their parachutes slung low, and ended up sitting on them while flying.  The parachute would become hard and uncomfortable, prompting a nickname for the malady caused by sitting on that packed-down parachute.  He used that nickname as he complained to my mother one afternoon when he went home [11]:

"I've got PB!" he moaned.

My mother asked, "What's PB?"

"Parachute Butt!"

Now, in our family, discomfort from sitting in an uncomfortable chair or couch is called "PB."

---------------------------------

References:

 [1] "Statement of Service for Pay Purposes, request for," in Arden Packard, U.S. Navy Service Record, Case Reference Number 2002-191-1946, National Personnel Records Center.

[2] U.S. Census Bureau, Population Census 1930, San Diego, California, United States Naval Training Center, ED 37-56.  Microfilm Publication T626, Sheet 10-B, Line 66.  National Archives and Records Administration.

[3]  "Statement of Service for Pay Purposes, request for," in Arden Packard, U.S. Navy Service Record, Case Reference Number 2002-191-1946, National Personnel Records Center.

[4]   "Report of Compliance with Orders," 25 January 1937, in Arden Packard, U.S. Navy Service Record, Case Reference Number 2002-191-1946, National Personnel Records Center.  (He was detached from the aircraft carrier USS Farragut 20 November 1936 and reported aboard NAS Pensacola, after leave granted upon detachment from Farragut, 25 January 1937.)

[5]  State of Florida, Escambia County, Marriage License and Certificate, Arden Packard and Martha Shideler Reed, 16 July 1937.  Marriage Book 36, Page 248.

[6] "Statement of Service for Pay Purposes, request for," in Arden Packard, U.S. Navy Service Record, Case Reference Number 2002-191-1946, National Personnel Records Center.

[7]  Navy Department, Bureau of Navigation, note stating Arden Packard recalled to active duty 3 October 1941; reported to NAS Miami around 22 October 1941, in Arden Packard, U.S. Navy Service Record, Case Reference Number 2002-191-1946, National Personnel Records Center.  (This is a very cryptic note, not in the usual form of Navy correspondence, no subject line, no signature, but on Bureau of Navigation letterhead.)

[8]  Chief, Bureau of Medicine, US Navy, letter 15 September 1942, in Arden Packard, U.S. Navy Service Record, Case Reference Number 2002-191-1946, National Personnel Records Center.  (He had been found qualified for flight duty by a board of flight surgeons at NAS Miami, but the Bureau of Medicine reviewed the case and ruled that he was "not physically qualified for duty involving actual control of aircraft.")

[9]  Officer's Fitness Report (Navpers 310A (revised 8-44)), 28 February 1945, in Arden Packard, U.S. Navy Service Record, Case Reference Number 2002-191-1946, National Personnel Records Center.

 [10]  "Student Aviators Take Plane Trips," Pasadena (California) Post, 16 April 1929, Page 13.

[11]  Family story told to me by my mother.

The Difficult Side of Genealogy

From time to time, we come across sad stories in our genealogy.  

Such as my maternal grandmother, twice widowed while in her 20s and married a third time to an unstable ne'er-do-well.  Her first husband's family "ganged up on her," as my aunt told me, and took away her two younger children, her daughters, and adopted them within the family.

Such as a collateral relative in my mother's paternal line, who lost three children in the 1918 "Spanish Flu" epidemic.  Her husband gave her no help at all, perhaps because he was devastated and couldn't handle it or perhaps because he was a jerk.  She divorced him, left Indiana for California and married a doctor there, making a new life for herself.

Such as my brother and his wife, who lost their daughter, my niece, to leukemia when she was 22.  Then, some 20 years later, my brother succumbed to leukemia as well.  I suspect agent orange, as my brother was a VietNam veteran, a Marine.

Such as a favorite uncle of mine, who, after a multiple-heart-bypass, committed suicide.

Handling these sad stories is difficult, when we exercise our empathy, our compassion, and look at them from the perspective of our forbears who faced such heartbreaking events.  Then it happens to us . . . 

Like my brother and his wife, my husband and I are faced with the prospect of losing a child.  Children just should not predecease their parents, but it does happen.  Our younger daughter (52 years old but still our child) has an incurable form of cancer, multiple myeloma.  It is treatable and she is in remission, but this form of cancer cannot yet be vanquished.  Knowing what is coming is like staring down the barrel of a firearm waiting for that bullet to come out and hit us.  

But it enables us to share the grief of our ancestors and relations who went through similar periods of stress, sadness, grief, and loss.  The stories we discover of how our ancestors survived such events in their lives lets us know that, battered and bruised as we may be, we can get through the hard times, the bad times, the sad times, and continue.  We continue to gather the stories of our ancestors and preserve them and the sources that document them, to pass on to our children and make them available to the wider world of family history researchers. 

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Goals

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun asks:

1)  What are your genealogy goals for 2025?  Consider genealogy research, education, organizing, service, writing, and whatever else you care to share.

My main genealogy goal this year is to enroll in the non-credit courses in genealogy offered by Boston University.  I'd like to sharpen my skills.

Another goal is to finish my revision of Richards Packard: His Ancestors and Descendants, a family history of my direct line from my fourth great-grandfather.  I have found much more information, so a revision is needed.  I will deposit copies with the Georgeville, Quebec, Canada, Historical Society, the Library of Congress, and the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

I need to finish investigating land ownership in East Tennessee by my mother's ancestor, Teter Nave.  I'm hoping to be able to go back far enough and, with other information, apply to the First Families of Franklin lineage society.

I'm thinking of contacting my county's board of education to see if they'd be interested in a course on genealogy in their continuing education program.

 I think that's probably enough.  These, alone, will make for a busy year.