New guest book

Well, after 3 nights and many hours, I’ve created a new guest book for the site. The old book was a freebie from a commercial site, and I really detested reading a website filled with Viagara ads. The company was pretty good, considering that they did clean out the spam now and then, but it was an irritating problem and I decided to fix it when I did this update.

I tried to create a few guest books with .cgi script, but for some reason I couldn’t get any of them to post. My husband and son suggested php. It worked very well, on the seventh guestbook script that I tried. Either the version was too new for the server, or it was filled with ugly emoticons, or it just didn’t work. The one I settled on isn’t my favorite, but I can always upgrade. For now, I am just happy that it’s functional (after 7 hours of working on it tonight). Obsessive? me? lol.

I received an email from a distant Palmore connection regarding Booker Randolph Shorter. He was the son of Nancy Palmore and John Shorter. I didn’t have much on the family and this cousin (Mary Beth Shorter Majesty) told me that Booker had children and grandchildren, and that she knew of poems that he had written to his son as he went off to fight in the Civil War.

That intrigued me. I love fleshing out these characters from the family’s history. Mary graciously sent me the names and dates of Booker’s descendants, as well as a moving poem that he wrote to his son. I had looked around the net last night and found another site with info on Booker. Apparently, 3 sons went to war, and 2 were killed. I will post the poem after I get some sleep.

Work work work

I worked on the site for about 5 hours today and it is beginning to shape up. I renamed all 250-some pictures with a good organizational scheme. I made a navigation bar that I’m happy with, after alot of trial and error. I updated every page and renamed them all.

I’m very excited about the revamped site, because I’m sure it will be much simpler to update. This blog will help me keep track of records that I discover. It may also be a good research journal.

I’ve thought of a few things I’d like to accomplish…
Update all the trees. I need to remember to keep information about living people out of the published versions. I also would like to add the 50 or so great pictures I’ve gotten for various families.

I have scads of birth and marriage records now from Scotland and Cornwall that I could scan and include. I also have many more census records.

Tonight, after I was worn out from all the re-organizing, I decided to see what ancestry.com has added to their records. They now have the WWI records for Virginia. I found Rick’s great grandfather, William “Matthews” Palmer, living in Suffolk, Nansemond, Va. (which is where I found him in the 1910 census. I still haven’t found him in 1920. He may have been in Michigan by then, meeting Iris. I found Robert Felix — I believe this is Mac’s son.

Another distant Palmer cousin wrote me about a month ago. I believe I found his great-grandfather, Virgil C. I must email him to see if he has access to ancestry.com or if he’d like me to get a copy for him.

I also need to remember to get together all the records that I found for Gene Dunnuck. I MUST get them in a large envelope and send them on to him. I keep intending to organize and report how I found each new record, but, at this late date, I think he’d be happy to get a big messy pile to sort through himself!

Another reminder: get a short report and copies of census records, etc. to Gary. I found a lot of his Missouri family and it will give him a great boost for his own research.

4:30 a.m. – I’d better get to bed if I’m going to be any good putting up drywall tomorrow.