Tuesday's Tip: Examine your motivation for writing

I just read such an excellent post by a writing coach I follow which rang so true I had to share it with you here: To Dream, Perchance to Cry, by C.S. Lakin, the author of the blog, Live Write Thrive.

 Not only do I feel like that at the end of a completed project, I feel those same waves of momentary depression and perhaps envy mixed with a bit of discouragement every time I finish reading a really good book...watch a really good movie...and I wonder if I'll ever finish...if it will ever get published.

I'm glad to know that I'm not alone. My writing time is not consistent because it is my "other" job...the one that comes after the day job, which often leaves me drained...my eyes feeling heavy soon after I begin reading a bit of research to help me solve a plot or character problem. I write family history memoir and find I get bogged down because of trying to find the detail which moves the story forward and makes the characters believable. Analysis of facts seems to take me forever. I hope I do make it to the end of the race and that there's a wonderful reward at the end so that everyone can share the emotions evoked by the telling of the story.

What Estate Records Reveal About Our Ancestors

Estate Inventory for Abel Carter,  p. 1
FamilySearch.org:
North Carolina Estate Files, 1663-1964 

Once I located the estate records of my husband's ancestors, I began transcribing them and soon discovered that I needed to create a dictionary for many of the items recorded in these pages. 

Below is a transcription of the items listed. Those printed in bold face must be defined. NOTE:  I have omitted the names of buyers and valuations. I have also maintained the original spellings.

Estate of Abel Carter Deceased June 13, 1807 the Count of Sail

1 case with bottles, 11 pewter spoons, 1 case and 1 vial, 1 hackle and mouse trap, 2 slays and guears, 1 adds and howel, 1 plain and drawing knife, 1 peck, 1 pail and kealer, 1 tub and pail, 1 gun, 1 earthen pot, 1 wedge, 3 hoes, 3 razors and shaving box, 1 hat, wooling wheel without rim, 1 pail of trumpery, 2 pot trammels, 1 spider, 2 mugs, 1 cup, 1 earthen bole, Lot of crockery wair, spice mortar, 1 barrel, 1 hammer, 1 ax, 1 hatchet, 1 dish and 3 plates, 1 cagg, 1 bason, 1 case and other things, 1 jug, 1 chest and all that is in it, 3 powder horns, 2 pair kneedles, knives and forks, 1 cagg, 1 case and trumpery, 1 pot, 3 bottles, fish hooks, cagg of trumpery, grind stone, 1 Bible, 1 cagg and trumpery, 1 hand saw, 1 bed.

Altogether, the items sold for

24 pounds, 17 dollars and 2 shillings. 

The amounts owed to eleven creditors, however, 

totaled 31 pounds, 18 dollars.

Definitions of these items appears to be more difficult to come by than expected. 

If you remember, a spider had been defined as a skillet with legs that would be set over the coals of a fire. Below is a good photo of a hearth and implements. The spider skillet is setting in the foreground:

Mountain Geologists

The next item I had any success with was a drawing knife. The Nabb Research Center defines it as: 

Drawing knife (Draw knife, Drawknife) - an edged tool with a blade and a handle on each end, which was used by pulling the tool towards the user; such as a chair bodger, a cooper, a carpenter, a wheelwright, a rake maker, a basket maker, or a gate hurtle maker, e.g., "a drawknife and chisel were mentioned in Stephen's inventory, which suggests that he worked a lot with wood."

After this successful search, I decided to check on some of the other items in the inventory in their Illustrated Dictionary of Colonial Times. This dictionary, however, seems to be completed only to the letter "F", and the only other definition and photo I could find were for: 

Adze - An implement of varying sizes with varying blades, used to hollow out wood. Usually belonging to a skilled craftsman and not a carpenter, e.g., "'To an ould adze' was written in the cabinet maker's inventory."  

According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, trumpery is defined as: "trivial or useless articles." The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as: "showy but useless finery: bric-a-brac." So much for that. I wonder, how much of what I own could fall under the category of trumpery?

What kind of needles come in pairs. . . other than perhaps knitting needles?

I was able to find a definition and photo of a pot trammel from, of all places, Old Deerfield, Massachusetts. . .the home of some of my KING and NEWTON ancestors. 

The word "trammel" means adjustable. This fireplace gadget allowed the cook to raise and lower a pot, hanging from the hook, to five different positions, which was much easier than constantly adjusting the intensity of the fire. It is made in two parts of wrought iron by a blacksmith and is an improvement over the simple "S" hook.

 The other items are still a mystery. Perhaps if I were to contact Tryon Palace, I might be able to find someone there who could explain what those items were. Or, if any of you might have an idea, please feel free to share your expertise.

So, until then . . .

Finding details in the most unlikely places...

How do you tell the story of your family when there are no photographs...no letters...no diaries...

Courtesy NYPL Digital Gallery
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?805110

The first thing I did was to look up my critical dates in historical newspapers available online. The first was the day Isaac Carter and his siblings appeared as orphans in the Craven County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, Monday, December 12, 1853. On the very day that Isaac, Nancy, Annanias and Zach were bound as apprentices to William Temple there was a celebration in New York City. It was the seventeenth anniversary of the historic Colored Orphans Asylum at Hope Chapel, Broadway. 

Later in the week, I remembered how my New England Ancestors research conducted in the 1990s led me to interesting details uncovered in Estate Inventories. I decided to go to FamilySearch.org and look at some Craven County Estate Inventories to see if I could unearth anything related to my husband's ancestors. 

Below is how you may be able to locate estate records for your ancestors:

1. Go to http://www.familysearch.org
2. On the main page, scroll down to the country list and click on the country where your records are located (United States)
3. On the left side of the next page you will find the state list. Click on the state where your records are located (North Carolina). Note that in parentheses to the right of the state is a number: the number of records collections available. North Carolina has (16).
4. The next page that opens is the list of searchable records. You will note that those with a camera icon to the left of the title offer images of the records. Mine were located in North Carolina Estate Files, 1663-1964. You will note that there are 68,762 records available.
5. The title page for the collection will give you first name and last name search boxes; but, you can also search by EVENT or RELATIONSHIP. The last option is located at the bottom of the page: View Images in This Collection: Browse through images.
6. The Browse through images link led me to a list of counties. From that list I selected Craven County.
7. From there, a searchable surname letter list pops up, and I selected "C" for Carter. All estate records of people whose surname begins with "C" opens up, followed by the year of death/inventory/probate in parentheses. I found several Carters of interest: Abel Carter (1810), George Carter (1820) and William Carter (1867).
8. Once you have located the images you need, the best thing to do is to save them and then edit in your photo editor (I use Picassa). I then printed full size legal copies, and also stored them in my photo viewer/editor.

What kinds of information can be gleaned from Estate Records?

As you can see, I was unable to locate any estate records for Isaac Carter, his father, nor any of his grandparents. So the information I found could not tell me about him directly; but the estate inventories did give me an idea of what life was like in that time period in that particular region.

One item I found listed in both Abel and George Carter's inventories 

was one "Spider" valued at 0...10...0.

What was a "Spider?" 

The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as follows: 

A shallow, long-handled pan used for frying food. Also called skillet, ; also called regionally fry pan, spider.
REGIONAL NOTE   The terms frying pan and skillet are now virtually interchangeable, but there was a time when they were so regional as to be distinct dialect markers. Frying pan and the shortened version fry pan were once New England terms; frying pan is now in general use, as is the less common fry pan, now heard in the Atlantic states, the South, and the West, as well as New England. Skillet seems to have been confined to the Midland section of the country, including the Upper South. Its use is still concentrated there, but it is no longer used in that area alone, probably because of the national marketing of skillet dinner mixes. The term spider, originally denoting a type of frying pan that had long legs to hold it up over the coals, spread from New England westward to the Upper Northern states and down the coast to the South Atlantic states. It is still well known in both these regions, although it is now considered old-fashioned. See Note at andiron.
http://www.answers.com/topic/cooking-pan

Another thing that Estate Records can help with is establishing family relationships. 

From these two records I was able to establish four relationships:

Three Razors and Shaving Box to Kelser Braddick  0 pounds...8 shillings...6 dollars

three powder horns to Kelser Bradddick   0 ... 1 ... 0

1. Abel Carter's bequest was left to Isaac Carter's grandfather, Kelsor Braddock.
2. Abel Carter was Isaac Carter's great grandfather.
3. Kelsor Braddock's father, Peter Braddock, was Abel Carter neighbor and friend. Their children would've grown up together.
4. William Carter was Issac's uncle: the brother of Isaac's father (Isaac). Their father's name was also Isaac; and his father was Abel Carter.

Besides relationships, we can also discover how one year affected a family's life.

1867 was the year of William Carter's death...but it was also the year of his nephew Isaac Carter's marriage.

I've a long way to go in order to recreate the time and space of Isaac Carter's life in the manner of Charles Hale's video: Breathing of an Ancestor's Time and Space. In his description he wrote:

When our ancestors leave few traces how can we learn of their lives, how can we get the true feel of things? 
My ancestors left little, there's an old funeral receipt, but there are no letters or mementos...just a smattering of photos is all that remains. 
By understanding the events that surrounded one incident in my grandfather's life I was able to get the feel of things; I was able to breathe from his space and time.