The summer of 2000 I attended the Black Family Reunion in Hillsdale, Michigan with my mother, Ida Skinner Petersen and my daughter, Jessica Shoop. Discussion came up that the reunions were becoming less well attended and Betsy Jones, the organizer, requested lengthening the time between gatherings.
At this point I made the fateful comment, Have you tried the Internet to find more people? Several of us shared email addresses and have emailed (Hi, Larry and Diane, Hi Deb!) If you were one of those from the reunion and haven't heard from me, please recontact.
When we returned to Mom’s home near Edmore, I got online with my Mac Powerbook and just started looking to see what was available on the World Wide Web.
For Mom’s side I started with the blue covered Black Family Book that Betsy gave me at the reunion and with the box of papers Mom had collected but had languished for attention when Dad got sick. I was looking for Skinner, Raymond, Crommer, Coy(e), Blount (Blunt), Silvernail (Silbernagel), Lickley and Hoard on Mom’s side, and for Petersen, Nelson and Nielsen, Rasmussen, and more, on my Dad’s side (Harvey C.). In mid March, 2001, I started looking at the two volume Hillsdale Bicentennial book Hills and Dales and have found quite a bit more info.
NOW I AM HOOKED...
I've connected with Treshia Thueson, D. Hammon, Mary Lickley Hill, Pat Shaw, Kris Winkerink, Doris Stuck, Charles Wallace, Carol Ashley and her mother Betty, Wayne Monroe, Jon Marx, Karl Hillig, Randy Reeg and Leila Menzies, who is following up on finding the father of Harvey Black. And I've connected with Gerald Sartain who is part of the Crommer/Hoard line and with his cousin, though not in the Crommer line is a genealogist and has volunteered to do some checking in their local courthouse.
I've talked my sister, Gwen Young, into scanning pictures Mom had, and said helpful things to her, like You know... so and so? The one that was born/married/died, 150 years ago.
I haven’t attempted to count the names that converge with my generation, (that’s a whole big database problem) and these postings at this domain and url are meant to be temporary until I get around to acquiring a domain name/server space. I am posting the beginning narrative, clippings, photographs and research as a service to those I have met online in this search and until a more comprehensive site can be built. Please consider this a request to post information and leads you have provided, and hopefully, will provide.
I am forever grateful to, and in awe of, the people with the research skills to document and pull forgotten links back into memory. My skills are more for making what you have found available online, and making your work broadly available, and hopefully, fruitful.
As I have learned about my family I have spent considerable time thinking about how different my life is from theirs- our communications, transportation, health and more- and how mysterious I will appear to my ggggrandchildren.
Please check back as I will post additional info as it becomes available. If anyone is fluent in cgi and would like to help me set up a bulletin board , I would be appreciative!
TIA-
4/3/02- Karl Hillig recently sent the 1905 and 1909 Black Family Reunion photos and a family portrait of Phylancourt's family from what appears to be the early 1900s.
3/28/01- Recently I discovered the power of the “Reunion” family genealogy program I bought for my Mac. I hope to have web pages generated by the database online soon.
Please note photos may take a while to load if you are on dialup- such is the nature of the telephone connections. I have optimized the images and tried to keep pages small.
A word about browsers... If you are have difficulty viewing pages and you are using a Netscape browser <you have no idea how much this next phrase hurts>, switch to Internet Explorer. I am on a Mac and have tested the pages in both Mac versions, NS consistently has problems and IE doesn't. When I have had an opportunity to view the pages on a pc the appear to work in IE, I suspect NS has the same problems. Such a small, though very special and important ;-) segment of the browsers are NS that I suspect most of you just "surf on in" without problems. Unfortunately I don't have the time or resources to assure absolute, flawless, cross platform and cross browser compatibility, as much as I would like to. If you are on AOL and having trouble, let me know. I will truly try to fix it (and not break it for IE).
Your OneWhirldWebWorker, Rae
