Show Me Your Hobby – Linda Shares Her Love of Genealogy

A big THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in their photographs and stories. I hope by sharing other people’s hobbies and stories here on One Hundred Dollars a Month we can all find unique ways to spend our down time in creative and enriching ways.  Keep them coming!

Linda writes…

It amazing to me how two of my favorite hobbies seem to be intertwined. I love gardening on our one acre lot and canning, but I have another love just as much, which is family history. In doing family history I have discovered that I come from several generations of farmers. I was a late in life baby of my parents and I was raised hearing their stories about living during the Depression as teenagers on farms in Nebraska. (Here is a picture of my great grandparent’s farm near Shelton, Nebraska taken in the early 1900s and colorized.)

My father also did family history so I grew up hearing many family stories. I was excited to research and learn that my family roots go back to both Jamestown in 1619 as well as the Pilgrims and the Great Puritan migration into Massachusetts in 1620-1640s. I want to share a story about my spunky Great Grandmother, Lillie Mae Allsop Dugdale.

At the age of 20 in 1886, as a single woman, she decided to stake a claim for 160 acres near present day Enders, Nebraska. It was literally in the middle of nowhere then and not much more populate today. Here’s a document of her original claim that I was able to research and find.

With the help of her brother, she built a sod house to live in. I can’t imagine a 20 year old lady in the 1880s alone. She was a woman of a lot of adventure and bravery! She had to walk 3 1/2 miles to get to the river for water. (This is a picture of another ancestor’s original sod home.)

She described her home in a life story: “My claim soddy was 11 x 12 feet in size. I had the cutest little home of any of the young homesteaders, with all the trimmings. I made it into a real home. I had a good bed, stove and truck. Then I got a box and fitted shelves into it. I made pretty curtains for the door and in front of the cupboard and window. I bought a small table and chairs.

My brother plastered the walls. I had some pretty colored prints or pictures; I even split corn-stalks and made picture frames, too. I carried sod (left over from building my house) and made a narrow flower bed around my whole house and extended it about 5 feet on each side of the door way. I drove a long stick up on either side of the door-way into the wall and trained morning glories across the space above the door, so one seemed to enter a bower of beautiful blossoms. I even bought an organ and brought it to my soddie so I could practice.” (I play and have a love of music too.)

“At first I had no plaster on the walls. One time I saw a garter snake in between the sods about as high as my face. I knocked it down and killed it. Then another time I was sitting sewing just inside my window when I saw a movement at the window and a big 4 foot bull snake was on the window ledge running its head back and forth across the window panes trying to find a way to get inside.”

“Our road to the river ran through a real prairie dog town. As almost everyone knows, prairie dogs, rattlesnakes and little red owls all live in the same holes. We seldom drove through this place that we didn’t see several rattlesnakes. In those days most everyone would stop and kill a rattlesnake wherever they saw it. We all would go prepared. To us, they were a common nuisance.”

(Her future oldest daughter, my grandmother)

“There was a prize in the county to see which homesteader could raise the largest watermelon from seed we were given. We had to have 10 acres of land plowed and planted in corn or other things, like potatoes, in order to prove up and keep our claim. There was a camp on the lower end of my homestead building for workers grading for the new railroad.

One Saturday in the early fall a neighbor came by and told me I had better bring my best melons into my house or I would lose them that night. I carried about 40 or 50 watermelon into my soddy. My prize melon was not quite ripe so I dug a hole and gently put my big melon into it and covered it over carefully. Well, sometime toward morning, the gang of hoodlums came and they were so angry to find no ripe melons. They smashed and destroyed every melon that I left out, it seemed, but they never found my prize melon, so I won the contest.”

I wish I could meet and talk with this wonderful great grandmother and get her gardening and homemaking skills from the late 1800s to 1930s. She is a real hero to me. Stories like these are gems that I love to find in my hobby of Family History and share with my children and grandchildren.

~Linda

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If you would like to have your Hobby featured on One Hundred Dollars a Month, here’s what I’m looking for:

1. Your hobby has to be submitted as a well written post. A one sentence “I make homemade kites” will not do. Now, 4-5 paragraphs about how you got into kite making, how long you’ve been doing it and the different types of kites you make WILL DO. That’s what I’m looking for! How long have you been doing it? Do you make money off of it or is it just for fun? Can you teach me how to do it?
2. Be sure to include a little information about yourself, like your hobby’s backstory and how you got into it. Also, please include your first name and what state or country you are from.
3. Your submission MUST have 5 HIGH QUALITY photos attached. You do not have to be a professional photographer, but your photos do need to be clear and well lit or I won’t be able to use them.
4. All photos must be original, and they must have been taken by YOU. All photos you submit may be used on One Hundred Dollars A Month once submitted.
5. Sadly, I might not be able to use every submission if I am overwhelmed by responses. A $20 Amazon gift card will only be awarded if the submission is published.
6. If you have a blog and would like me to link back to it, please let me know, I’d be happy too.
7. Although you must submit at least 5 pictures per submission, you can always include more. The more the merrier just in case I do not select them all.
8. One submission per person.
9. Send submissions via email to onehundreddollarsamonth @ gmail.com {remove the spaces} and be sure and put Show Me Your Hobby in the subject line.

I can’t wait to see all of your fascinating hobbies! Might just encourage me to take up a few new ones.

Hobby on,
~Mavis