Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday is a day many genealogy bloggers post pictures, some with captions and some without captions.

James Edward Baker Jr and his wife Elizabeth "Joan" Bionaz Baker

San Jose, California December 1974

This is the last picture taken of my parents before my dad died. He died 28th of February 1975. My mom died 21st of August 2001. She never remarried after my dad died.

Mail Package

Lisa, my sister-in-law, and my brother, Tony, went traveling last fall and their traveling always include genealogy stops along the way. Now Lisa is an avid genealogist and Tony supports her. Last fall their travels took them to Salt Lake City and the Family History Library and this week I received a package of things they found. It was fairly thick and I was excited about getting it. It contained several naturlization papers and also a lot of things that she found in books. I almost didn't go swimming that day. I swim for exercise and the class I am in was the same day the package came, but I did make it swimming and that afternoon I sat down and looked through it. It will take awhile to go through everything and enter it into my database.



One of the things that came in the packet was a copy of the information Lisa was able to get on my grandfather John Bionaz. We were hoping to get his enlistment papers. Since both of his parents were born in Italy, we were hoping his enlistment papers would give us a little more information on his father. However, he served during WW II and Korea and so only his spouse and children can get all the records, since his wife and daughters are dead we will have to wait for 62 years after he died to get those records. We don't understand what could be in those records that erquire the wait. Lisa did the request under Tony's name hoping that since he was the grandson of the sailor they would release the records. But they insisted even with all the close family dead and the their death dates provided, they still would not release the records. How frustrating!

Monday Memories

My children grew up near their father's family and so they never really heard the stories about my family. I've decided than what I would do is do a Monday Memories post. So now when I blog on Monday's it will be about my memories growing up.

Tonight I'm going to talk some about my background. I'm the only girl of 4 children. I have 3 brothers, two older and one younger. People use to say I must have been spoiled being the only girl, unfortunately that was not the case. You see, my mom's only sister had the first girl on my mom's side of the family in July and my dad's only brother had the first girl on his side of the family in August (Linda shares the same birthday as grandma Baker even) and then my youngest brother is just 11 months younger then me. Then on top of that, both my mother and grandma Baker were good seamstresses. I remember at about the age of 10 being excited to get my first store bought dress that was actually bought for me! Now let me explain, girls had to wear dresses to school everyday and could not wear pants. We did wear shorts under our dresses to school so we could play on the monkey bars and not have to worry about our panties showing. Most of my life either I wore hand me downs or home made clothes. I even learned to make my own clothes and made my prom dress and my wedding dress. So the home made clothes were nice ones, but it was more of the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. (or store bought dresses were better)

My Name

I was named after both of my grandmothers. Betty for grandma Betty (Elizabeth Grace Hawke Bionaz) and Lu for grandma Baker (Lucy Mary Huyck Baker). My mother did not have a good relationship with her mother at the time, something about a hard preganacy on my mom's part and bad health on my grandmother's part. Apprently when my mom was pregant with one of my older brother, my grandma Betty had her breast removed because of breast cancer. Some one got their feelings hurt, because the other one could not visit because of their health. I found this out later from my grandmother Betty shortly before she died. Then to make matters worse, when my mother was pregant with me, her sister was pregant also and my mother had problems and her sister did not. it's interesting how people can get their feelings hurt, because they do not understand the other person situtation.

So my mother put a hyphen in my name, because she could not figure out any other way to put Lucy in my first name. Then to make my name harder, she did not give me a middle name. I spent a lot of my youth explaining how to spell my name and what a hyphen is (a hyphen is the line in my name, Betty-Lu), and no I did not have a middle name. At least I was not asked if my name was short for anything. That happened to my brother Tony. Every one insisted that Tony was short for something else. At least he had a middle name.

It's been awhile since I last blogged, but I have had some Health problems and then kept putting off writing on my blog, because of the time that had has past. It just is hard to go back to something after you've been away awhile.

Well, I did get Reuben Miner's land records and have since transcribed them. There wasn't anything about his parents, but I did find out that he was able to finish khis homestead paper work in about 2 and one half years. i think that might of been because he had a disability discharge from the military. He had lost his leg while serving in South Dakota during the Civil War. He was out hunting for food the his unit and the gun went off while lhe was taking it out of it's holster and shot his leg. It was bad enough for him to lose his leg.