The prompts for January are:
Week 1: Start
Week 2: Favorite Photo
Week 3: Longevity
Week 4: Invite to Dinner
Week 5: In the Census
So let's get started...
This story starts in April 1988 when the National Genealogical Society had their annual conference in Biloxi, Mississippi. My mother, Vera Begue Booksh, lived in Long Beach, Mississippi then and I drove up from Florida to take her to the conference.
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| Vera Begue Booksh stands by the second largest Live Oak in Mississippi in Long Beach. |
She and my Aunt Marie had been doing genealogy for about 20 years and I offered to put their information on the computer. I never intended to get into it myself, just put their research into a genealogy program and print it out for the family.
Finally we sat down with all the family group sheets, pedigree charts, papers, and photocopies that she had accumulated. I turned on the tape recorder, and we started climbing into our family tree. I picked up one of the photocopies and asked, "Now where did you find this information?"
Mama said, "Oh, that was from the New Orleans Library. We did a lot of research there...
"OK," I said, "Do you remember what book you got this information from?"
"It was a big red book."
"I need to put down the name of the book as the source of the information."
"I don't know the name of the book!" Mama was indignant. "What? You don't believe me!"
I could see this was not going to be as easy as I had thought. I could put all Mama's data into the computer, but I was going to have to go out onto some shaky limbs to document the sources. Soon I was hooked and I've been doing genealogy ever since.
Fast forward to 2009 when I finished the first draft of a book on the Begue family. Mama and Aunt Marie were both still alive and able to read the draft and offer corrections and additions. Other relatives also added information and at last we were ready to publish. In 2012 I got my first copies of "Mama Said:The Mostly True Story of the Begue Family of Louisiana and Mississippi." (It's available at Amazon.com.)
As I say in my introduction, If Mama's family had a motto, it would have been, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Her family had a lot of good stories. There were stories of lost fortunes and disinheritance, stories of larcenous lawyers and disreputable relatives, stories of mysterious apparitions and ghostly happenings. They were passed down from mother to daughter like treasured pieces of needlework. I remember hearing many of these stories told and retold, as we sat on Grandma's porch on summer evenings.
But putting those stories into a book was not the end of the story. I had started in on doing more research on my father's Booksh side of the family. There was so much information that it would require more than one book. One particular ancestor called out to me. Great Grandma Belle Tisdale had left a trunk full of letters and photos of her family. I decided to start a blog as a way of organizing the transcriptions of letters and my research on the letter writers and people mentioned in the letters as well as a little history of what was happening in the Louisiana area at the time. I'm up to 1875 if you would like to take a look at belletisdale.blogspot.com
Now fast forward again to just a few days ago when I got a phone call from a man named Begue who lives here in Central Florida. His son had a genealogy project for school and he wanted to get a copy of my book. He turns out to be my third cousin once removed. So this story has come full circle to a new start for a new genealogist.
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