Other: Breaking Branches In the Family Tree

I decided to turn to the Internet to try to flesh out the tree. Yes, my grandmother left voluminous genealogy records, but they were not ordered or assembled into an actual tree, and it would have taken a long time and a lot of floor space to try to piece through it.

So, among other things, I've discovered that Thomas Watkins "Maggots Saved My Life" Perry, Jr., whom I mentioned in my last post as having survived a Civil War bullet to the lung, seems to have been my great-great-great-grandfather, and apparently died in 1917, aged about 75 and 53 years after his miraculous survival in Atlanta. The paternal line of his wife, Susan Florence, is traced back on one site to a William Flourance, born in 1637 in England or France, and who apparently immigrated to Virginia by the time of the birth of his first child, around 1670.

And Elmer Melvin, recipient of that "shellback certificate," issued the first time he crossed the equator, apparently traces his paternal line (and therefore part of mine) to one Daniel Melvin, born on the Isle of Skye in 1708, who came to America, married a North Carolina native, and then had his first child around 1737. And because the Melvins are the ancestors of my Mormon grandmother, they were all posthumously baptised into the LDS Church. Even the ones who were born and died before Moroni even started talking to Joseph Smith. I am not making this up.

No, really, I'll stop now. Mostly because I've just about run out of free sites to search and I refuse to pay to join one. This obsessive micro-burst has just about run its course.

Although I still don't know whether or not "stopped to look at moon" is a euphemism or not...