I Yet Live
The workload has lightened up but it was really rough there for a while.
I had to take a foreign language test for my MLS program. It had to be a modern language so I took it in French. It was pass/fail; while I don't know for sure how I did yet, I'm pretty sure I passed.
Next semester should be my last in this program. Thank God.
I recently had a resurgence of interest in my ancestor Adam Cloninger. Someone placed on-line a nineteenth-century historical treatise on Lincoln County by a guy named Alfred Nixon. The treatise said the name of my ancestor, Adam Cloninger, was on a deed giving land to build a church for a group of German settlers, sometime in the late 18th century. Nixon wasn't very specific. My dad is a big local historian and genealogist and he sent me an e-mail giving more background about this, but the e-mail has disappeared, and my memory wasn't so good. All I remembered is that my dad said Adam was acting as someone's agent; it wasn't his land he gave to the church.
I was bored one day and ran my last name as a keyword in WorldCat. There weren't many hits, but one was Pioneer Adam Cloninger's life in North Carolina. Only one library was listed as owning this, and it was - for some reason - the Wisconsin State Historical Society. So I asked them to loan it to me. Instead, they sent a photocopy of the entire thing, which was fine because I had intended to copy it anyway. The only regrettable thing is that there are copies of 18th-century records in the material, and being copied again, they didn't come out so well.
My brother's middle name is Caswell, and he got that name because it's an old family name. My dad didn't know why it was an old family name, but after he had been doing research for a while he realised it had something to do with the early North Carolina governor, Richard Caswell. The material I've gotten confims that Governor Caswell granted land in Lincoln County to Adam Cloninger in 1787, possibly in thanks for his service in the Revolution. There's a copy of the original document in the material, and I can't make out most of the handwriting.
I also found a date for the deed that gave land for the church, sort of. A timeline supposedly complied from Lincoln County records lists that as happening in 1803, although there's another article there that states the congregation was formed ten years earlier, and implies that was about when they got the land too. And the person Adam acted as agent for was his father-in-law, Jacob Rhyne. My dad had told me that, and I'd forgotten.
Adam died in 1818, and his grave is near the town of Stanley, in what is now Gaston County. That's only a few miles from High Shoals, where my dad was born in 1929, and that's less than twenty miles from Newton, where I grew up.
Talk about a feeling of being from a place.