Tooles and the Military

Bill formed the Utah Dixie Marine Corps League Detachment in St. George. There are many retired Marines who live here and we've made some wonderful friends from that Marine Corps community. He's also involved with the Veterans Coalition of Southern Utah and very much enjoys his military contacts. We've also been involved with the Devil Pups program which Bill has brought to the Southern Utah community. Here we are at a Dixie State College ROTC program at the Courtyard by Marriott Convention Center Spring of 2009.

Utah Dixie Marine Corps League Blog

Grand Girl Visit June 2009

My daughter and two grand girls (Grace, 12, and Claire, 8) were here for four days for a little vacation time for them and to help me celebrate my 39th birthday. I'm officially older now than both my children! Gracie's only request, other than going to Tuacahn Theater to see Footloose, was one or two trips to one of our favorite restaurants, Chuck-a-Rama. The reason it's a favorite?? The home made yeast rolls. This photo says it all.

We took in a bread baking class at Leavitt's kitchen shop, shopped the mall and the outlets (scoring big at Eddie Bauer), made sure we hit all the best restaurants, swam at Sand Hollow Aquatic Center, got Claire's car sickness tendency eliminated by the local NAET doctor, Dr. Pinkston, took in the dinosaur museum (real footprints and impressions of dinosaurs found here in St. George), and saw the most awesome production of Footloose. Thayne Jasperson (So You Think You Can Dance, High School Musical, etc.) played the lead. What an incredible dancer and entertainer. There was even a surprise puff of smoke during the song I Need a Hero when Superman flew across the stage on the high wire. The girls were thrilled with the production and we felt it was the best we've seen yet at Tuacahn, the most gorgeous outdoor theater in the country, tucked into a natural setting of red rock cliffs. The girls are now in SoCal visiting some friends before heading home this weekend to Auburn, California. It was good to have them visit in June. In past years, they have only been free to visit in August - a very ugly hot and humid month for St. George.

I can assure you that it's easier to have kids in your 20's and 30's than it is to have grandkids in your . . . ummm . . . late 30's, so I'm off now to rest.

Photos from Footloose

Claire and Grace with "Urleen" and "Wendy Jo." Incredible singers and dancers!

"Willard" was one of our favorites.
His personality popped on stage
and he was delightful to talk
to after the show.

Burrill Relatives

While searching for Burrill ancestors, I came across the website of Dan, a third cousin. On his website were photos of my great grandfather and his siblings. Dan’s ancestor, Sadie Burrill, was my great grandfather’s sister. I was able to locate Dan in Washington state and eventually made contact with him and his sister, Leslie, and more cousins, Sally Jean and Margaret Ann. What a wealth of information went flying back and forth!! Thanks to them I have much more of a background on the Burrill descendants. One of the joys of genealogy is locating cousins and then finding out what great people they are. :)))

Sadie's 75th birthday. (She looks so
much like my Grandma Faye!)

Northern California

During our last trip to NoCal, we had some family time with my two kids' families. We met on a rainy, windy night in Davis, California at Bistro 33 located in the old City Hall building.

Here we are. Front row, L to R:
Claire and Grace Breckenridge (Shannon & Paul's girls)
Juliette and Jenna Ingram (Jay & Jill's girls)
Boppa (aka Bill Toole) in the middle.
Back row. L to R: Shannon, me, Jay, Jay's wife Jill and Shannon's husband Paul Breckenridge.

Fun in Northern California

We have just returned from a quick trip to the Roseville, Fairfield, Auburn, California area. Bill had a liaison meeting for the youth program his Marine Corps League sponsors. It was in Fairfield (the home of the Jelly Belly Factory). We had the pleasure of having dinner with both of my kids and their girls. Here they are: Grace, Jenna, Juliette and Little Ham Claire. After a great dinner at a restaurant in the old City Hall building in Davis, California (half way between Jay's home in Alameda and Shannon's in Auburn, we were talked into a visit to the local Ben & Jerry's where the girls assumed the expected sugar high. On Monday, Shannon and the girls, Grace and Claire, took Grammy to the Roseville Galleria. We did our part for the local economy! It was rainy in NoCal so we expected to get warm again once home in our desert outpost of Southern Utah. Not so! We're chilly here, too!

Family History Expo in St. George

Wow! This was a big day for me at the Family History Expo this weekend in St. George! I spent all day yesterday, went early today and stayed till the prizes were awarded at 5:15 this evening! My English genealogy records classes were great. I learned a few more tips while viewing the censuses, and tried to take classes to cover the areas I'm working on now. I was able to work in 11 classes over the two-day expo.

My Google classes (took three that incorporated Google in some way) were awesome. I already have a gmail account for this blog but didn't know there was so much that can be done with it - including a telephone account where Grandma can call you and leave a VoiceMail which you can hear on your computer and even download as an audio file into your family tree software. Here's just one of the many tips I learned today to whet your appetite for the next genealogy expo in your area.

To search for only your target on a particular website, type the target name, then the word "site": (with the colon behind site) and the URL. For example:

Burrill site:http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

"James Parks" site:www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

I think the "hits" are better than Rootsweb's own search feature. You can use this on any website for any subject or topic, and it saves search time.

I very much enjoyed the speaker on Virginia. What an expert she is!! Apparently Virginia is one of the, if not THE, hardest state for research, mainly I believe because it was originally much of the east coast except for Maryland and NJ. Later it split up into Kentucky and Tennessee and West Virginia, etc. so finding the records is tedious and most are not online, more’s the pity. Wouldn't you know James Parks was born in Virginia! But I have this professional genealogist’s name now and if we need her once we find just where in Virginia James Parks was born, I know where to go for the answer. [I hope we won't need her because research there is so tedious and time consuming that it's expensive.] She has compiled several books from her years of gathering records, but they were expensive and I don't yet know just where in Virginia we're headed. Maybe one day it'll be something to think about - certainly less expensive than flying back to Virginia and trying to find all the various courthouses and historical societies that might or might not have information for us.

www.arleneeakle.com

One of the interesting things she said was, if you have ancestors who settled early on in Virginia, then they’re likely from wealthy families. Frequently 2d, 3rd and 4th sons, etc. of the wealthier Scottish and Irish families who did not inherit the family property came to Virginia where they had large spreads, some with slaves, some big in tobacco farming, etc. Virginia was settled by people of means. So that’ll be interesting. Maybe our Parkses only hit Virginia on their migration path, but they were at least there when James was born around 1790.

My last class of the expo was on identifying old photos and it was a hoot. The speaker has written books, and has good stories on a lot of photos. She did a PowerPoint presentation with quizzes for us on how to look for clues. I had purchased a couple of books on identifying old photos from one of the vendors as that’s an area where I need to do some studying.

www.forensicgenealogy.info

Last, but certainly not least, I won a prize in the final drawing that apparently amounts to about $160! I got a full annual membership to World Vital Records and a copy of the book on Google advertised on their home page. They were out of the copies they'd brought to the expo because it sold so well, so they will mail me a copy of the Google book, and my subscription to the website should start on Monday. Here’s the site:

http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/

I don’t know much about the site yet, but I’m hoping it will be really helpful in pulling up records over the next year while I search for BMD [birth, marriage, death] records on Parkses and maybe even find more on my Burrill ancestors. All in all, though, we frequently heard speakers say: "the records are on Ancestry," and I do have a world subscription to Ancestry.

All in all, it was a very satisfying day, after which I had dinner out with my hubby at the Parrothead Island Broiler, always a yummy place to go. :))