My fellow WikiChatterboxes, are you ready for another Weekend Chat? Greetings from Cathey’s Creek, where the weather has been quite mild with a couple of days in the 80sF. I wish I could say that I’m enjoying it more, but my time has been sucked out of me this past week. Read on…
On the Home Front: The Connect-a-thon weekend was bracketed by a family in crisis (not mine). The family in question is living in extreme poverty with my 18-year-old mentee bearing the brunt of it as he is now the breadwinner. Four days a week he catches the bus for school and leaves there for work until 9 pm. He also works a half-day on Saturdays. There are a lot of things going on that I will not share here, but I have been constantly getting texts and calls from another member of the family for assistance, and mostly I have been in the car quite a bit and there we have provided some financial help, especially in the area of food and also rides to take care of other business.
This weekend my wife and I will be spending time on the computer helping my mentee get online forms for college completed, a North Carolina residency, the application, and a monster of a FAFSA form (government financial aid). I took him by a local college to get advice a few days ago. I think he’s excited about it. Education is his ticket out of the environment he is in. It is a particularly bad situation. Squalor and family mental health issues probably describe it best.
I am mentally and emotionally exhausted, and I have got to find a way to pace things better. I am a bit out of my league. Social services around here are slow to get things done. Right now, employment and an unregistered, uninsured car, and no one with a driver’s license are the things keeping them from moving forward. We’re working on it.
On a brighter note, my two daughters are on a “sister trip” to California, and it appears they are having a blast.
On the Genealogy Front: During the Thon, I took on a family of Underwood descendants that I had not touched…. ever. These are descendants of Betsy Underwood McKee who with her husband and children moved to Tennessee. It started off rough. One group of descendants moved a lot, ending up, mainly, in California. Records were rather sparce for those folks, but once I got back into Tennessee things moved much more productively. I still have more descendants to add to this family.
There is a story that has been handed down in my family that my ggg-grandfather, Reuben Underwood, walked to Tennessee three times as an elderly man to visit his daughter and son-in-law. The truth of this story is proven for at least one of those trips when Reuben appears in a census (geographically between him and Tennessee), apparently either on the way or on a return trip.
So, with this family, I made around 125 contributions to the Thon, but I was interrupted by the situation I mentioned above.
My beloved grandfather, Ralph Underwood, would have been 135 years old this week on the 23rd.
I sincerely hope that all of you, dear cousins, are doing well.
Enjoy the Chat!