My name is Julie. I tend to dabble in just about everything that piques my interest, from gourmet cooking to gardening, to sewing, to soap making, to traveling and sight-seeing to… you get the picture. I learned to sew and cook before I was a teenager. Won’t say I was good at it but I did learn the basics. Then mastered them. I suspect that the reason I don’t have more money is that I’m interested in doing too many things. Once I’ve mastered something, I’m off in pursuit of learning something new: Learning how to do it, do it well, move on.
Except for genealogy. It’s a continuing endeavor – my GENdeavor (or Gendeavour if you’re English). I stop for a while when I feel I’ve exhausted all the available online records but it’s there, in the back of my mind, ever nagging. I think most of us want to know where we came from otherwise Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and MyHeritage wouldn’t be so popular.
I am a West Virginia transplant, living in North Carolina, but planted and sprouted in the Kanawha Valley where the majority of my parents’ family lives and my heart remains. Before I was 10 years old, my family moved to Fayette County, WV where we lived for several years. Afterward, we settled in Greenbrier County. I attended and graduated from a small Christian school at Alderson, went to community college in Lewisburg, and worked in and attended school in Beckley as well as the area around Charleston. Since then, I’ve lived in two other states, traveled through a bunch of them, and have made a feeble attempt to put down roots right where I am.
Alas, I am prone to editing my own blog posts. This is due to the discovery of new evidence, concrete and circumstantial, and my loathing of being wrong. Did I say that out loud?
Gendeavour is divided into several categories with the top main categories being Paternal Ancestors and Maternal Ancestors. There are so many surnames that I work on tracing that they are difficult to remember but here are the main lines, the ones that take most of my time:
- Paternal Ancestors surnames: McGrew / McGraw; Martin; Withrow; Johnson; Jacobs; Beckett; Hill; Vanbibber.
- Maternal Ancestors surnames: Phalen; McClanahan; Johnson, Harmon; Smith; Norris.