Thursday, October 30, 2008

Family Tree

I love researching the family tree. It's been so much fun. Lately, the Cunningham family joined a website called Geni, where you can put and organize your family tree. We started off small, but we've added on significantly on the Cunningham side and on Mom's side. For example, for the past few months I've been trying to find more information on "Grandpa" Jesse Jenkins but have had little success. I finally found him yesterday, and we discovered that his wife's name was Jane, not Cora, and that Cora Jenkins (Jesse's descendant) married George Large, my great-great grandfather on my Mom's side. I haven't found much on the Large side of the family (though I'll keep looking), but I did trace the Jenkins family back to the eighteen century, where it suddenly ends. My guess is, Thomas Jenkins may have been a slave and was freed during that time, which could be why there are no records of his parents. I also found more on the Pope side of the family and discovered that Thomas Pope moved from England to Plymouth in 1627, seven years after the Pilgrims first arrived there and about ten years before Captain William Cunningham arrived in Virginia. Anyway, Thomas seems to have been a part of the Plymouth colony and bought lots of land from the Indians, land that became a big homestead for the family for years before they began moving west in the nineteenth century. Mom also added on to the family tree, and she informed us that we have Rushmore blood in us, that they were florists (a big comparison to the belligerent Scottish Cunninghams... haha), and that our ancestors once owned the land that Mount Rushmore was built on. I'm still looking for information on the Irish Dawson side of my family, but none of them are listed on Rootweb (though I will still keeping looking). I'm also working on finding members of the Kline, Cline, and Long side of the families, and I hope I can find which generation it was that one of the men married a Cherokee woman. So, I'm having a blast with this project.

I can't think of much else to post, but I will mention a few things. First, Seth and Mandy got their midterm grades for Geneva. Mandy has all A's except for a C in math, and Seth has a mixture of A's and B's with one C. Mom got a 97 on her paper on beer in science class, which she is happy about. I had a debate in class last Thursday whether Jackson was right or wrong in forcing the Cherokees to leave their homes. I never got a chance to speak, and I was sort of chomping at the bit to do so. I'm still waiting for Dr. Rafshoon to give me a grade on my debate paper, and it's unlikely I'll get it this week. I'm nervous about my physical science quiz, because the teacher informed us yesterday that the highest grade in the class was 80 something while the lowest ones were in the teens. I didn't think the quiz was that hard, but now I'm more worried over what I missed. I'm excited about an upcoming music project because I get to write about one of my favorite Irish bands, Clannad (they invented the Enya-esque sound before she used it but put out a much greater variety of music than she does), and I think I'm getting too picky about which three songs I have to use for the paper. The weather down here is cooold! It has suddenly cooled down to the point where you must wear a coat outside. Nights are cold, and days are cold and windy. The weather is too cold for late October, which may mean a colder winter. Maybe we'll get a nice snowstorm this year with actual snow instead of that powdery stuff that you can't make into snowballs.

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