I just wanted to say Happy Memorial Day to you all and wishing you a great weekend with your family! I think genealogists can appreciate remembering those who have gone before more than others; we work with this daily! For those of you in the south central KY area, I would like to encourage you to come out and visit our South Central KY Historical and Genealogical Society meetings. Our session last night was tremendous! Nancy Baird from Western KY Library, Manuscripts, was our speaker and we had a wonderful time. She gave us a brief history on Judge Joseph Rogers Underwood (provided pictures) and his second and young wife, Elizabeth Cox. Joseph lived 1791-1876 and Elizabeth lived 1818-1886. In looking at her photograph, one sees a demure young lady. While Joseph was serviing in the US Senate; she was back in Bowling Green raising 8 children, overseeing a 1500 acre farm and helping him plan the building of his dream home, now known as Ironwood. Elizabeth was an avid letter writer and Manuscripts has a large amount of her correspondence to Joseph. If I remember correctly, Nancy said she wrote over 400 letters to Joseph which were full of information. He wrote quite a few less and she chided him as to the letters to which he had not responded. She talked of the big Siberian freeze that had occurred in the 1850's leaving no fruit and vegetables, meet that was too tough to masticate, her desire for a much smaller home, sending some of their slaves to Liberia. She was a well-read and a liberated woman for that era. Nancy's readings were done with great expression and while listening to the snippets of the letters and looking at Elizabeth's picture - one could just picture her hustling around their home being the "perfect" mother and wife - and the trials and tribulations of raising children from age 1ish to 19. Next month's program features Samuel Terry IV - one of our former presidents. He will be presenting a slide presentation of many pictures from the past of Glasgow entitled "Our Town". His photographs show the old buildings, houses and peoples of the past of our town and is considered to be an outstanding picture of the past. Sam is very knowledgeable of the time frame covered and it should be a great meeting. I again might be quiet on the list for a tad. I'm tackling a project that, at the rate I'm going, might take years. I am trying to transcribe the deed grantor book indexes of Barren Co 1799-1832. There are five books with about 200 pages each, perhaps 50 entries per page. My digital, tho excellent, is unable to cope with the size of the page and copy costs are prohibitive. So I've been at the County Clerk's office for several days, hand writing the information. This is one time I wish a laptop would float down from the sky! I'm able to transcribe only about 3 original pages an hour as there is a lot of information including: Date recorded, the grantor(s) names, grantee(s) name, date the instrument was written, the deed book and page where the deed is recorded, the type of transaction (deed, power of attorney, right of way, assignment, etc) and a brief description of the location of the property. I am trying to sneak up there as often as I can; have made it up to page 10 of the original book. I think this information will be of such a tremendous help to researchers. Again, I'm wishing you a Happy Memorial Day; I likely will make my regular posts, not sure yet! Sandi SCKY Archives: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index?list=south-central-kentucky Barren Co Archives: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index?list=kybarren GGP: http://ggpublishing.tripod.com/