A brigadier general?

This evening, I finally got a chance to really examine the Confederate records of my 3rd great grand-uncle, Dr John F Kennedy. Most of the 50 documents that I downloaded from Footnote.com a few days ago are pay vouchers and the like. But one document in particular grabbed my attention:

Notice his signature and what is written below it:

“Jno F Kennedy
Surgeon PACS
Brig Genl CSA”

“Brig Genl CSA”? Dr Kennedy’s rank at the end of the Civil War was Brigadier General? Wow! I know that he was head of the Confederate Hospital at Lauderdale Springs,  Mississippi and that he had been promoted from Assistant Surgeon to Surgeon, but a General?

The Union Officer who signed Dr Kennedy’s Parole of Honor was Brigadier General G L Andrews, United States Army. Gen Andrews is buried at Arlington National Cemetery:

“…Andrews returned to the Army as Lieutenant Colonel of the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, of which he became Colonel in June 1862. On November 10, 1862, he was appointed Brigadier General of Volunteers and was involved in some of the early battles in Eastern theater of the war, including Cedar Mountain and Sharpsburg…”

Sounds like I need to do some serious research into the Life and Times of John F Kennedy, MD, Physician & Surgeon!

And the winner is….

RootsMagic! What swayed me was the extensive charting ability that the program offers, plus a lot of little things: the customizable main screen (you can add almost any function in the program to the toolbar for easy access!), oodles of available reports, an online Family Reunion Planner and the timeline function. Click here for a more complete list of features

For the $29.95 download price I also got 2 separate programs:

• RootsMagic Chart- Remember GenoPro, the program that allows you to draw family trees and genograms? Well, it used to be shareware and I had a copy and lost it somewhere along the way. Now it’s a commercial program and costs $49. Outa my budget! But with RootMagic Chart, you can build trees and genograms. Good deal!
• Place Finder- This program enables you to put towns and counties together, along with map coordinates, elevations…throughout the U. S. It will also access MSN LIve Search Maps, so you can see where in the U.S. your place of interest is.

I have a lot to learn about RootsMagic, but so far I am very impressed. I think this program will suit me for a long time to come.

Oh, yeah, it imported my Family Tree Legends GEDCOM, including images. I think it will do the same with Family Tree Maker.

Still undecided

For the past 2-3 months, I have been looking at and trying out several genealogy database programs, looking for the perfect program for me.

So far:

• Ancestry Family Tree- Remember this one? My first genealogy program! Ok for the basics, but nothing special. Ah, the memories…
• Family Tree Maker 16- I have been using FTM for about 3 years, but I have never liked the way it handles sources & citations. The images that it displays are also not very clear. Takes forever to save and close when a lot of images are added.
• Family.Show- Awesome to look at! In its early stages, not very useful right now. No reports, charts, exports. Great potential for the future!
• Family Tree Legends- Free. Ok, but limited. Still not quite right.
• Family Tree Builder- Also free, from My Heritage. Some really cool graphics, I think they call that Web 2.0. Will only export entire file, not selected surnames. In other words, you can’t just export the Kennedy Family or the Turner Family.
• The Master Genealogist- 2 versions, very fancy. Lots of bells & whistles. When I grow up, I wanna be…The Master Genealogist! A bit more than I need.
  
• RootsMagic- I’m trying this one out now. Very nice, clear, neat interface. Great charts & oodles of reports. The images that I added to it are pretty good.

Still thinking…

The Military Records of N B Kennedy, MD…

…are now available at the Bluebonnet Country Genealogy Library!

The “rewrite” went much faster than I thought it would, so I uploaded it this morning.

An office person I’m not!

I have been fighting (literally, it seems!) with OpenOffice Writer for 2 days! I have been trying to put together an ebook of Dr N B Kennedy’s Civil War service, and Writer has been bucking me all the way. It’s probably me, as I have never taken so much as one “office” class, such as typing or how to use an office-type computer program or the like. Yesterday I had the entire book complete, with but a few little typos yet to resolve, and somehow I managed to freeze Writer over and over again! I even found an online word processor that I could upload my file to, and it froze! Apparently in creating the file, I turned left instead of turning right and created a corrupt or otherwise unopenable file. I had saved a bit of the manuscript as a simple text file, but most of it was lost when I was forced to delete the entire file. Writer would not open at all as long as the file was on my hard drive!

Of course I still have all of the original documents and those graphics that I had created for the book, so when I got home from work this afternoon, I began the book anew.

So now I am about halfway through the “rewrite”, as it is much simpler to put it together a second time. Hopefully, the ebook will be finished (again!) by tomorrow evening and I will be able to upload it to my Lulu storefront.

A Big Thank-You to Kathryn

Kathryn Doyle of California Genealogical Society e-News and California Genealogical Society and Library Blog has spotlighted Bluebonnet Country Genealogy in the June 2008 newsletter. Thank you, Kathryn, for your very kind mention!

I have been busy…

…downloading Dr John F Kennedy’s NARA file to my hard drive, along with all the other goodies I have found on Footnote in the past several days. Why? You see, it’s like this….(remember the Saturday Night Live skits about Wayne’s World? The part where Wayne and Garth fade away into their day dreams (usually about Heather Locklear!)? Remember the strange sounds as their imaginations take over? Well, those sound effects can be heard right now!)… I originally had a free acount at Footnote and I had bought and downloaded a couple of death certificiates from them. The items I bought were supposed to stay in my “account” online, available to me forever more. Problem is, when I actually went to a paid subscription, those items disappeared from my account. So, now I make sure I download everything to my hard drive (which I had already done with the 2 death certificates, anyway), for when someday I don’t have a paid subscription. Just in case…

Anyway, the plan is to create ebooks out of these new-found yummies. Might be a little while, cause I have been pretty busy at work, plus it is so hot in Texas right now that I just don’t feel like doing anything, genealogy or otherwise.

But I’m sure I’ll get back to research soon enough. It’s hot in Texas 5-6 months out of the year, and I’m not fixin’ to waste all that valuable time, believe me!

About that NARA packet

To start off with, I’m a bit slow sometimes…

I know that Footnote.com has the Confederate Civil War records for several states and also for their officers “at large”, those men “who did not belong to any particular regiment, separate company or comparable unit, or special corps.” But I thought that these databases where only indexes. So yesterday I was just wandering around Footnote and decided to see if they had the indexes for a couple of my surgeon ancestors. Well, guess what: Footnote has the entire files of these men, not just the indexes! So I found the files for Dr John F Kennedy and for Dr Sydney P Kennedy. Sydney’s file only contains 9 documents, but John’s has 51 documents! I am is hog heaven…again!

But I got to thinkin’: What about Dr Nathan B Kennedy, the 3rd of the Kennedy physicians? A couple of years ago, I ordered and received his file from the National Archives, a total of 37 documents. But what if they missed one? What if Footnote had a document that I didn’t get? Everybody makes mistakes, right?

So I put his name in the search box (which is a vast, vast, vast improvement over the old search!), and up his documents popped. So I got my file out and compared mine against Footnote’s, one document at a time.

The result:

• Footnote has 6 more documents than I had gotten from NARA!- now 4 were basically the outside of folders or envelopes, containing usually Dr Kennedy’s name only
• 1 was a pay voucher
• and 1, the most important, was a letter explaining the civilian contract that Dr Kennedy had signed to offer his services to the Confederate Army! (Dr Kennedy had signed the contract, which I got from NARA, but it was canceled after just one month. Why? I didn’t know.) This new letter explained that at the time the contract was signed, the Confederate hospital in Lauderdale Springs, Mississippi was overrun with casualties and desperately short of physicians. Apparently as soon as that situation was resolved, then the contract was canceled.

By the way, the original contract is not in Footnotes’s database!

So if anyone has received the Confederate service records of their ancestors from The National Archives and Records Administration, I would recommend that you check Footnote and compare the two versions of the file. You might get lucky!

And a Mortuary Warrant is…

Art. 6227. MORTUARY WARRANT. Whenever any pensioner who has been regularly placed upon the pension rolls under the provisions of law relating thereto shall die, and proof thereof shall be made to the Comptroller within forty (40) days from the date of such death by the affidavit of the doctor who attended the pensioner during the last illness, or the undertaker who conducted the funeral, or made arrangements therefor, the Comptroller shall issue a mortuary warrant for an amount not exceeding Two Hundred Dollars ($200), payable out of the Pension Fund, in favor of the heirs or legal representatives of the deceased pensioner, or in favor of the person or persons owning the accounts. (Proof of the existence and justice of such accounts to be made to said Comptroller under oath and in such form as he may require for the purpose of paying the funeral expenses of the deceased pensioners. In such cases where a warrant for the pension for the month during which the pensioner died has been issued, the same shall be returned to the Comptroller who shall mark the same “Cancelled” and file it; or if the warrant has been cashed, then the Confederate Pension Fund shall be reimbursed with the amount for which the warrant was drawn before the mortuary warrant herein provided for shall issue. Where such warrant for the pension has not been issued, the same shall not be issued, but the mortuary warrant herein provided for shall take place thereof.)

Texas Vernon’s Texas Civil Statutes- Article 6227. Mortuary Warrant

…Oh, ok, to pay for Sarah’s final expenses!

A great research day!

On June 12, I sent an email to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission requesting a copy of the Confederate Pension Application File of my great-great-great grandmother Sarah Jane Carroll (John Bunyan Carroll). The process is quite simple: search the database, if you find an ancestor, just send an email to the address given and they will send copies of whatever files they have, along with an invoice.

And it was really just that simple. So when I checked my mail this evening, there was a large manilla envelope from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission! Inside where 13 pages of documents…and a bill for $2.64!

Enclosed was:

• the application, including names, dates of birth, marriage & death, and the name of the unit that J B Carroll served in and when he served
• witness statements attesting to the facts that Sarah Jane was his widow, that she had been a “bona fide resident citizen of Texas” since 1855, and that J B Carroll had served in Captain Riley Wood’s Command, Texas Cavalry, Confederate States Army (this group was part of what would later become our modern-day Texas Rangers!)
• a request sent to the Adjutant General, United States War Department for the Military Record of J B Carroll
• an invoice from W T Little & Sons, Hardware, Furniture and Undertakers- for the final expenses of Sarah Jane Carroll, who died in 1942 at the age of 99
• an Application for Mortuary Warrant for Sarah- stating when & where she died, including a statement from the attending physician at the time of her death

The last two documents where required to close the file, I’m sure.

The good news here: Sarah was awarded the pension on July 1, 1931 and received it until her death. Unlike poor Sarah Turner, Sarah Carroll was not represented by Wills & Co of Washington, DC!

Now I just gotta figure out what a Mortuary Warrant is…