Tag: Alfred Josiah Smith
The Art of Successful Letter Writing
A Letter from an Ancestor By Susan Phelps “In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people’s lives.” ~ Anatole Broyard On May 9, 1887, the Reverend Charles Smith sat down in his home in Plover, Wisconsin, to write a ...
Letter #7: December 27, 1889
The series continues A letter from Josiah INTO IRONWOOD My mother found letters authored 129 years ago by my great, great grandfather, letters, in fact, partly responsible for the start of this blog. The author's daughter is our malevolent matriarch. Alfred Josiah "Si" Smith was his name and his family lived in Ironwood, Michigan. As ...
Family history: Storytelling with a theme or topic
Choosing a subject or topic to tell a story Day-to-day aspects of life 100 years ago or more When trying to capture what life was like 100+ years ago, it is difficult to know a person's personality or character from a photo. While photos may not reveal an ancestor's personality, we can come away with ...
Obits and what they offer
What there is to learn from an obit There may be surprises My great, great grandfather was Alfred Josiah Smith. Let's pick apart the obit for his sister, Alice May Smith Lytle, presented in the following article. Looking at the information regarding the pallbearers, Susan makes a good point that not all of Alice's siblings were ...
The Malevolent Matriarch 