Sepia Saturday: New Treasures From My Mother #4 - Sally Proctor Fargo

Sally Proctor Fargo (1862-1940)

In the packet of photos that my mother recently gave me, was this familiar face. I have quite a few photos of my grandfather Everett Proctor's Aunt Sally (sometimes called Sallie), but in them she is well weathered by the years. It is so nice to see her fresh young face here for the first time.

The photo was taken at Talman Studio in Nebraska City which was, according to the photographer's stamp on the bottom of the photo, located on the north side of Main Street. I spent a ton of time trying to figure out what Sally was doing in Nebraska when I know that she spent her life in Illinois, Iowa and Washington State. Then, I finally used Google Maps and found out it is only about 16 miles from Sidney, Iowa where Sally lived from 1885 to about 1902. That was a lesson that I won't soon forget. I couldn't find anything at all about Talman Studio and it was very difficult to read the name on the photo card, although I did find some local families with that surname, so I am quite sure that is the correct name.

Since I cannot find any information about the photographer, it is difficult to narrow down the time frame of the photo. Sally lived in Sidney from the time she was 23 to 40 years old and this photo could be from almost any of those years. 

Sally didn't marry until she was 42, so she did not have any children of her own and was very close with her brother Daniel's children. In fact, when Sally was very ill in 1938, my grandmother Aune Proctor nursed her back to health even though she was pregnant with my mother at the time. There are a lot of photos of Sally with the family in my series of "Letters from Aunt Cleo".

This is how I am used to seeing Aunt Sally. She looks like a nice lady and I have heard nothing but good things about her. In 1904, she married Arva Fargo (who also had a photo in this packet) at her parents' home in Washington. Judging from what I have heard, sadly I don't think it was a very happy marriage. She was living with her single brother Charles in the 1930 Census, which is interesting because in the 1900 Census she was also living with three of her bachelor brothers. None of the Proctor siblings married except Sally and my great grandfather Daniel and he was the only one who had any children. Lucky for me, he bucked the family trend!

Follow Friday: Google Your Ancestors

I have become a real fan of Google for my genealogy research. With more and more information being digitized and put online every day, it is amazing what you can find! Google's mission is to make information easily accessible to all of us. As a researcher that is music to my ears!

One Google search of my great grandparents' names led me to an interview done by the Issaquah Historical Society with my mom's first cousin that she hadn't seen or spoken to in almost 60 years. Since then we have enjoyed a mutually beneficial and thoroughly enjoyable collaboration, enabling us both to learn more about our Reini family. I have provided much of the research and she has provided photos, documents and, best of all, flesh-and-blood first-hand stories of my great grandparents who raised her. We even went to visit her this spring and the cousins were reunited after all of these years.

Many of my searches end up at Google Books. In my experience, there are already a number of historical publication on early counties and their founding families. In these, I have found all kinds of interesting tidbits on many of my ancestors that help to fill out lives that would otherwise be just names and dates on a page. Google Books has the goal to digitize ALL the books in the world, which on August 5th they estimated to be approximately 130 Million. So, keep checking back. You never know what might pop up!

Quite often in my Googling, I find others who are researching the same families that I am. It seems that many of the researchers with the best documented genealogies do not put their work on Ancestry.com, but they DO put it on Rootsweb. In contrast to the sites behind a pay wall, Rootsweb appears to be fully indexed by Googlebots, thus included in your Google search results. The Rootsweb WorldConnect Project is just FULL of well documented trees with extensive source material.  It is especially refreshing to be able to contact the researchers directly via their listed email addresses.

I love to use Google Maps to get a better understanding of where my ancestors lived and migrated, as well as how far away they lived from "suspected" relatives. When you Google a place name, usually a Google map will come up at the top of the page. After clicking on it, there is an option to choose "Directions." From there you can plot exactly how many miles it is from one of those small towns we so often come across in our research to another area of interest.

Google Translate is a big help when I am researching records in other countries or trying to read a letter written by one of my immigrant ancestors.

Just tonight I saw that Roots Television has a new video on using Google News archives for genealogy. I think I will have to check that out too!

I could go on and on about the genealogy applications of Google. Heck, I'm even using Google's free services to publish this blog.  If you haven't tried Googling yet, give it a whirl. You might be surprised what you learn!