My always humorous blogging buddy, Lori E, over at Family Trees May Contain Nuts, has bestowed upon Flipside the coveted award...Atta Girl....and all I had to do was eat and pay an outrageous amount for a very nasty steak dinner to get a blog in from my vacation.

What I neglected to mention was that for $2.00 a half hour, I could have used the computer down at the administration building in the Treasure Lake complex, but that would have meant downloading the photos and blog onto a thumbnail....too much trouble when on vacation...don't ya think!

Nope, instead I paid about $15.00 just to use my notebook. BTW, I also also had enough time to catch up on a week's worth of e-mails, but not enough time to catch up on by blog reading.

Thank you Lori for this recognition!

Jones'n for some WiFi

Almost an entire week with no Internet connection! And I survived ;-)

Last night, Friday, my brother and I went to a restaurant in town for dinner. It was probably the worst meal I have eaten in some time, BUT there was FREE WiFi connectivity. It was worth the $35.00 tab for an almost inedible meal to get my e-mail and have an opportunity to post a blog. It's amazing what lengths we will go to.

We are back from the Allegheny Mountains and Treasure Lake. I'm happy to report that we had great weather and some very exciting finds....blogs will soon follow. Perhaps the most excellent time of the entire week was Thursday and Friday.....two warm and sunny days. Through one of my brother's old high school friends we were able to meet up with one of his Treasure Lake buddies who lives on the lake. Right up near his deck was a kayak.

Now I have to tell you that it has been, whew.... almost 35 years since I sat in a kayak....but I loved every minute of maneuvering it down a small stream up in the Allegheny National Forest near a small village called Westline. I have wanted to try it again, however life got in the way as it often does.

This year, as part of my non verbalized 2009 wish list, I wanted to do some kayaking. Thursday and Friday, I got my wish and loved it. No foolin, it's like getting back on a bicycle! I also gave wind surfing a try.....not so successfully.

"Scene" from the Road

We are at the half way point of our week’s vacation at Treasure Lake, located just outside the town of DuBois, Pennsylvania. DuBois, pronounced du boys, has lost what may have been the French pronunciation over the years….or maybe it has always been called du boys.

This area of Clearfield County was, and still is heavily forested and a good percentage of the early population was from France and was engaged in logging and lumbering. The town’s namesake, John DuBois, a descendant of French Huguenots, had a prosperous lumber mill among other enterprises. In fact, he owned the acreage where present day Treasure Lake is located. He purchased the land and gave it back to the citizens of DuBois as a place for recreation.

The pace of life in this community, which is plunked down in a richly forested area and is flirting with the Allegheny National Forest to the northwest, is quiet and calming. It is a retreat from the sometimes frenetic life in the city where we live. There aren’t even many places for me to get “connected,” which is the reason I have been out of circulation for a time.

Our condo abuts one of the golf courses and wild life is present everywhere, seemingly undaunted by humans.

We find time daily to get out and about after a leisurely morning. So far our destinations have included walking the streets of DuBois and Clearfield photographing the turn of the century homes and buildings, wandering the cemeteries in DuBois and Frenchville, photos of ancestral homes for my cousins, swimming and having some delicious dinners out.

Dubois Cemetery--How nice to supply a port-a-potty!

Today’s activities are before me and hopefully I will find a free WiFi spot to catch you up on my whereabouts sometime today.

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY

The road is calling and Flipside will be on vacation for a week. There will be the usual days swimming, dinners out and sight seeing, but with a genealogist on board, cemeteries and old family haunts are also in the plans. This summer the focus will be the faces and places that are my cousin's Mom's lineage (my Aunt Barb)--McGoey, McGovern, Mitchell and Green (how Irish is that!) in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania.. I will keep blogging and posting photos once we find some WiFi connectivity......cause my brother has an I-phone and he "has an app for that." Stay tuned!

My NEW Banner

Flipside never had a banner, but my new "best friend," Deez, over at Cemetery Explorers, has corrected my omission. He designed and sent me the PERFECT banner for Flipside.

THANK YOU DEEZ

15th Edition of Smile for the Camera—George Henry Hughes

The word prompt for the 15th Edition of Smile For The Camera is "They WORKED hard for the family." The professions of our ancestors are almost as interesting as the people themselves. Some of our ancestors worked very hard; they took in laundry, worked the land, raised many children, or went to school and became professionals. Photographs of them working are called occupational photographs and are rather hard to find. If you do have a photograph in your collection or family photographs, bring them to the Carnival. This edition is hosted by footnoteMaven over at Shades of the Departed.

My paternal grandfather, George Henry Hughes, was employed as a draftsman with The American Bridge Company, a Division of U.S. Steel, Ambridge, Pennsylvania, located on the Ohio River west of Pittsburgh. I don’t know what type of position he had when he was first employed with American Bridge, however I do know that he began in 1913 at the age of fifteen.

Over the years American Bridge has been responsible for designing and building hundreds of bridges and buildings in the United States and abroad. Some of the more notable are: the cable for The San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, The Verrazano Narrows Bridge in New York, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower and the Mackinac Straits Bridge. These were all designed and constructed during his years with the company.

A local Pittsburgh project that my grandfather worked on was the Civic Arena which had a motorized, retractable roof of fabric-coated plastic. During the early 1950’s, my aunt can remember her father working on the design of the Civic Arena every night at home. He had some form of blocks that were made to copy the drawings on paper and spent hours working with the blocks trying to figure out how to keep the roof of the circular building up.

My Grandfather Hughes was employed by American Bridge his entire working life. He retired in 1961 after 48 years of service. He worked hard for two families during his lifetime. As a teen he added to the family earnings and once married he supported a wife and three children. My grandparents enjoyed a relaxing life after all the work years in warm and sunny St. Petersburg, Florida paid by a retirement plan provided by the company.

I’m “moon walking” to the Genealogy Happy Dance!

A few months ago, while googling a couple of my ancestor’s names, I happened to find the Google book site. And what a grand find it was. New and useful information is to be had in the old books that Google has scanned. I was lucky this time around to have access to the entire book. I have also found that there are times when all you are able to see is what Google refers to as “a snippet”.

Now, I regularly plug in my direct ancestor names just to see what has been added AND this week up came my paternal great grandfather, George Ethelbert VanGilder. Two early 1880 catalogues from West Virginia University had been scanned and added and there he was, part of the student body enrolled in the Preparatory Department for 1881-1882 and 1882-1883.

We have an 1888-1889 autograph album belonging to George VanGilder. Numerous signed pages are addressed to him as “Teacher” and from some of the pages I have determined that he taught at Woodland School #2, north of Morgantown, West Virginia. Not knowing what the educational requirements for a teacher were back in the 1880’s, I was not certain whether or not he took advantage of a college education. Thanks to Google Books, I now know! The VanGilders were residents of Morgantown and lived just up the hill from WVU--an easy walk for my great grandfather.

I have been researching for almost two decades and have spent hours of concentrated time on my direct line. Often I think there is nothing else to find until a name pops up on the screen from a search engine and I’m off happy dancing again.

George Ethelbert VanGilder The Noble Life