This week, our Saturday Night mission from Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun is:
1) Did you have good genealogy fun this past week? Did you add to your family Tree? Did you make a great discovery? Did you try something new? Did you make family history?
2) Share your genealogy fun in this past week on your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack or BlueSky post. Leave a link on this blog post to help us find your post.First, you need to understand that I am a research nerd. I like sitting down and poring through books and documents and newspaper archives and all that. I love poking about in the past, for a variety of reasons.My family history relates to Jacksonville, Florida in many ways, reaching back to when my father was stationed there in the U.S. Navy during World War II. We lived there for a brief while in the very early 1950s, when I was a wee one. My mother brought me and my siblings back to Jacksonville after my father died in 1954, and I've been in or near Jacksonville ever since, with two years out for when my husband was in the Coast Guard stationed in St. Petersburg, Florida. Place is also an important part of our family history. So it's no surprise that, upon joining the Society for One-Place Studies, I picked as my one place the city I consider my home town: Jacksonville.
So I have been having fun for the past few weeks writing a series on the history of the consolidation of Jacksonville with Duval County in 1968. It surprised me and my husband, who was born and raised there, that the history of consolidation in Jacksonville goes back to 1923, when an attempt was made to pull off the consolidation of city and county. Another try in 1933 also failed. Success finally came in 1968.
My interest in the subject stems from having been a student at Florida State University at the time, and having been a government major.
So you can see the origin of this rather warped sense of fun that I have.But it's my fun. If you'd like to join in that fun, you can try my One-Place Study blog at One-Place Study: Jacksonville, Florida. In addition to the series on consolidation, I've written about the days when Jacksonville was the place to make movies before Hollywood, California, was a gleam in anyone's eye, about shopping in Jacksonville when I was young, and about a sorry chapter in Jacksonville's history, the day known as "Ax Handle Saturday."
