FERRIS. Charles Alexander

FERRIS, Charles Alexander - 28th of August 1869 - 20th of June 1899:  Working of FERRIS family during month of October starting with the children of  Thomas FERRIS I plan to work on the basics of obtaining references for Birth, marriage, death and other documents for all 10 children.  Today worked on Charles finding Birth Record, two Federal Census records, record of Marriage, one death and three birth records of children and finally one record of death for Charles.  Still missing records for one of his children (Walter).  Beginning a timeline for Charles's life helps to build facts and history on him and his family.  Left messages on Ancestry.com for people I found who had added Charles to their family trees in hopes of collaborating with them.  All in all a decent start to getting back into researching a bit each day and putting back the discipline needed in my time to take my research a few levels up ! Today I found Charles was born to Thomas and Sarah on 28th of August , 1867 in Cambridge.  He shows up on the Federal Census of 1870 at 3 and 1880 at 12 yrs old living in Cambridge still with both parents and siblings.  In 1894 working as a glass polisher he marries Margaret L DeArmond of Nova Scotia.  In 1894 their first child Charles Perley Ferris is born.  William comes along in 1895 though perishes from Enteritis in 1897.  John is born on October 13th ( same birthday as mine ) though in the year 1897.  Charles dies from Phitisis ( consumption or Tuberculois ) at the age of 31 on the 20th of June 1899 and is buried in Cambridge Cemetery.  His wife takes the children and returns to Nova Scotia to her family and farms the children out to different farms.  I have found the descendants of this family and met with one of them and talked to several of them.  I am hoping this next summer to once again get together with my "cousin" and continue to collaborate on filling in the missing people of this branch tracing the them from back in the late 1800s to the present.  I discovered that Cambridgeport had several large glass factories which several of the FERRIS family worked in.  One husband of a FERRIS started their living in such a factory and started his own business which continued for a generation or two afterwards.  Charles is buried in a Family plot ( pictured ) with his father and other Ferris family

2012

Happy New Year !  I am once again connected back to my membership in Ancestry.com and will soon hook back with NEHGS.  This year I will once again reorganize and publish my website.  I am hoping through Ancestry to collaborate with others who are researching the same surnames as I am.  Finally I hope to reconnect with some family through the web and visits to share my research.  Since this is a leap year and I have all that extra time I am going to share a "Who Are You - and How to Trace Your Family Roots" blog in here once a week. 

Organizing the Data

For about twenty years I have been collecting data on my family history. Through those years I have used many kinds of software to store the data. I began like many of us just writing down the information as I found it on paper, later starting notebooks to try and organize it. As time went on and the data became more involved and disorganized I began to separate the families data and try and focus on different branches. Over the years I have created many trees, registers, ahnentafel and other reports. I visited vita records offices and copied data from books when I couldn't afford to pay for the official record. I made trips to look at microfilm at the National Archives for Census, Passenger lists, and Naturalization Records. My interest never wavered though the time I had to spend doing this hobby did. Sometimes years would pass without me doing that much. Other times a few months would go by and other times maybe just a week or two would pass without me being able to look at my hobby. The desire to create this web site grew out of the hope of finding a way of putting all I have learned over the years in one place to share with my family. I thought that if I could do this and maintain the site I would attract more and more family to contribute and become interested in my research. Rainwave.com was the first to go up and it was thanks to my son Joseph that it had the flash it had due to his programming skills. Little content of actual genealogy data made it to the site unfortunately and I was baffled as how to get this dream done. Finally I found myself fully involved again and spending consistent time to sort and work through the data I collected. I began to use Family Tree Maker and GRAMPS at the same time with the thought of comparing them to see which would suit my needs the best. I found excellent qualities with both that to this day makes me continue to use both. It was through GRAMPS that I finally began the plans of a new web site. GoodIrishStock.com has been in it's third year now and I am proud to be the sole person who codes and updates the site. I continue to sort through the massive amount of paperwork I have collected using both Ancestry.com and New England Historical and Genealogical Society to confirm my older research. I try to update the site a couple times a year and as the new year approaches I find myself in the middle of another plan to revise. Communication with living family members continues to amaze me as I find new cousins from different branches of our family and they add their stories and data to the mix. I finish out this month working on my paternal family name: Ferris.
I will be reaching out to many who are out of the loop and do not even know of me. I am hoping to make new friends and family while continuing to document our history. My hope this coming year though is to find someone to share this task with who is computer literate and has the enthusiasm and time to dedicate towards improving, validating, sharing and researching this project. Those are my thoughts.
I hope someone out there shares them with me. So back to work at entering old data into the FTM software. From there I will create a GEDCOM file to transfer it to GRAMPS And compile it there. I will move the data then to code both in Kubuntu Linux and Windows 7 and upload it to the site. I hope this new version will find it's way into some new computers around the world and bring the Ferris Family and it's many branches closer together.

PLANS FOR 2011

As 2011 looms closer, I begin today the task of updating all the data collected this past year and inputting it into FTM and GRAMPS. Another revision of the website should be out before years end. Enough blogging.. Now onto the work at hand ~!!!!

Fall FERRIS

Well summer has passed and fall is fast upon us. The days of lazy mornings with Jeanne and our summer travels are over. Jeanne is back to work and I am beginning to discipline myself to rise by 5am and spend at least 90 minutes each weekday on my genealogy research and hopefully more consistent blogging! Today was good start though not quite 5am I managed to be up with Jeanne and caught up on my emails and began a bit of work on my FERRIS branch. I am formulating questions for my third cousin Larry Allen who I met in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia this summer. We had a wonderful few hours of getting to know each other and discovered a lot in common in spite of quite different life paths! We will continue our relationship and exchange information about our family. I hope he and his wife can manage to visit Boston someday ! I'll email Larry this week with what I need to tidy up the data on his side of the FERRIS branch. I am looking at considerable work on the MURRAY side of Jeanne's family from another unnamed researcher whose research I have obtained from Jeanne's parents. That should cover this week. More as the week goes by ! Happy hunting to all !

2010 Summer Web Site

I am very close on releasing this website!!! A quick visit by Joseph last night solved my CSS issue and I was finally able to fix the margins through pages containing text in the body. ( I am officially dumb for missing this easy fix, but that's why he's the expert. It took him all of three minutes to fix it ) So a quick re-write of four biographies, manually adding all media to GRAMPS and adding new photographs to photobucket will do it. The testing thus far has gone excellent! All other pages appear to be bug free and the genealogy data flows seamlessly. I am hoping everyone finds the new design pleasing and a bit more appropriate to the subject matter. I am getting excited as it has been a long time since I have actually released anything new on this website, due to family and work. The stars have appeared to line up for granting me the giant amount of time needed this year to not only release the new version but to make new releases much less time consuming. I am still not sure how this will relate to just how quick I'll be able to update data but with a bit of luck and some creative coding, I might be actually able to update monthly.! OK ... That's the news .. Now back to the biographies. Just a note... I am not providing footnotes for sources or references on line in the biographies. Those remain in the Ferris Library and are available upon request. It's just easier to show the Biography without all the clutter and let you take me at my word of it's accuracy. Once again sources are available upon request. !!! Thanks and happy hunting. !

2010 Summer Web Site

I have organized the data across the pages, coded the ones that need it so that they will blend with the data. The thirteen main pages related to the site are up and running and I should have them bug tested before mid week, of next week. Still to do are some pesky fixes and the re-writing of the Biographies page. Adding the media to the GRAMPS software from FTM manually is pretty time consuming and I think two days will take care of that. I am very excited to finally have it in the testing status so I can see it in a web browser and view the new design. I am hoping that before end of fall I will have developed a new strategy which will allow for quicker versions to be released. I am going to call on the king of code in our family - Joseph - and ask him to spend a brainstorming session with me for an afternoon. Though I like to be able to call this site my own and be proud of my creation, I am not above consulting the expert in this web software engineering field. His insights and suggestions are always spot on though often also beyond my programming skills !!! I guess in all this the good news is I plan on releasing this new version for all of you to see on the following weekend. Week of June 12-13th. Take a look and as always, please send me you suggestions, additions, and corrections. Thanks again for looking in. Hello to my newest "found cousin" Larry Ferris in Nova Scotia. Looking forward to our future discussions. Happy hunting out there !