Buried in papers

Very cold day and it is actually snowing now. I think we might have a covering by tomorrow.
 
I have spent most of the day back with family research, something I got caught up with a few years ago. I have files and file of data and occasionally I get some of them out, sort them and try to write it all up. The problem is that there is now so much more information online so it is very tempting to pursue this and try to fill some of the gaps I had to leave previously.
 
Today I got out a file that I haven't touched in a long while. My great, great grandfather's brother went with his wife to the United States in the early 1870s and they started a dynasty that spread from Boston, where they landed, out to Chicago and Wisconsin and other places. They were mostly involved in the hat making industry, but at the pattern or mould making stage of the manufacture. Most of the family worked as designers or pattern makers in hat making factories; a few of them actually owned such factories. When we were in Boston a number of years ago, we found one of these factories - now posh apartments. We also tracked down, with some help, some gravestones in an enormous cemetery.
 
As we are planning on spending a few days in Chicago, at the end of our US Adventure in the spring, I thought I would try to find out more about the members of the family who ended up around there. Locating family members on census returns for 1900 through to 1940 has been fascinating. It takes such a time to decipher these very detailed documents, and then put together what was happening to all the members of the family through those years, but it is absolutely amazing what one can find out and what a picture it gives of life for those people at the time.
 

Of course I now have to try to write it all up. And plan whether it would be feasible to visit yet another cemetery when we are out there. (The stories we could tell about 'cemeteries we have visited on foreign soil')