This week Mom sent me an article she had seen in the Athens paper about ghost tours in southern cities. One of the cities was Pensacola, which is a very old city. Here is a quote from the article:
Roberts’ favorite stories include the story of Pensacola’s Dr. Eugenio Antonio Sierra, who was buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery in 1849 after he lived to 99. Dr. Sierra used a guillotine to perform amputations on patients in his home office.
Mom pointed out that Dr. Eugenio Sierra is my great great great great grandfather. He was born in Spain and settled in Pensacola when Florida was still a Spanish colony. For some reason that gave me the bug and I was off to the internet to do some research. I found a lot of Dr. Sierra’s descendents, but then got kind of stuck connecting them to me. Eventually I found all of that, got some help from Mom, and went to Family Search a genealogy website run by the Mormons. The Mormons are big promoters of genealogy and Family Search has information from tons of scanned historical records. Plus the internet in general is easy to search and find stuff out, including from a lot of genealogy websites. I will post more later, but I have been putting in records of my ancestors (not much of it was there already, though it isn’t always easy to match up with existing data). I still have nothing on Mamaw’s family yet.
You can do a family tree which always seem to take up way more room than they need to. And Family Search does that right with lots of pop-outs and collapsing information, plus the ability to pan around the tree. But Family Search has another graphical way of seeing all of this: the fan chart. The top part of the fan chart is your ancestors (they save a lot of space by doing away with all of the siblings). And the lower part can be your descendants, but since I don’t have any of those at the moment, I don’t have a lower section of the fan chart. One of the funny things is next to my name on the family tree is a blank spot that says “Add Wife” as if it were that easy. And even though it is Mormon, you can’t add more than one wife, but there are ways to deal with people who get remarried. I don’t think you can have same sex marriages yet though (I can’t add a husband).
So here’s my chart, which you have to click on to be able to read any of it:
