5 Things You Didn't Know About Me...

Why am I writing this? Because I've been "tagged" as one of a series of genealogy bloggers. It's in an effort to try to get the genealogy bloggers more well known, a cause I fully support. So here are my five...

1. I don't really understand blogging! Actually, if you've read any of my blogs, you may have already figured this out. I've been stumbling through it and until recently haven't really searched to find what else is out there. But now I've I've been finding and google-bookmarking those I find for the past few weeks. I also use bloglines to give me a webased collection of rss feeds for those I want to track. So I'm slowly figuring it out. Tips and hints welcome.

2. I just learned recently that I have a (very distant and very indirect) connection to Yul Brynner. As a child, my husband's mother lived in a Russian community called Novina. Novina was a resort in Korea that catered to Russians in exile and Yul Brynner's father was connected to that resort, and perhaps the Brynners were related to the Yankovsky family of her step-father. Yul's son, Rock Brynner, has researched his family's origins and recently published a book about his family, Empire and Odyssey: The Brynners in Far East Russia and Beyond. My husband and daughter have ordered the book and are now in communication with researchers who also have interest in Novina, so I will write more about this in a separate blog.

3. From the third grade through the 7th, I went to a one room school, where I was the only one in my grade. The teacher was visibly displeased when she learned what grade I was in, since it meant adding a grade to her already full day. Each day she would call each grade up to the front of a room for a recitation in a round of subjects. First grades k-8 would be called up, one by one, for reading, then for arithmetic, then after lunch these rounds would be repeated for for social science and science. Penmanship every day for twenty minutes after lunch hour. This was also the time when the teacher held surprise desk checks to make sure our desks were neat. My desk never surprised her... it was never neat. We also had spelling, but I forget how she fit that in and art class was every Friday afternoon. Once the teacher learned I could read, my daily routine consisted of turning in my math assignment and very rarely being called up to recite. The rest of the time was all mine to read whatever I wanted. I thought it was a fine education.

4. I can't sing and am not musical. All my in-person friends and family know this, of course, but so far I've been able to keep it a secret on the web.

5. I can't keep up with everything I promise I'll do. Oh... that's no secret to anyone?

Updated the census page

Good grief! I was thrilled and appalled to see that my census site got mention on the rootsweb list. Thrilled, of course first... but then I immediately wondered if it had bad links. So I checked... and it sure did. I couldn't believe how many. Some due to my own carelessness...some because the sites had disappeared and some for reasons that mystified me.

At any rate, I got to work and the page is sparkling clean now -- or was as of five minutes ago -- and I've run Xenu Link Sleuth on the rest of the site and will get to the numerous bad links it found over time.

My next page... South Carolina.