In the meantime, Franchise and I have welcomed a new member to the family – an HP laptop. My files have been migrated and I’m doggedly pursuing one of my New Year’s resolutions – being more organized – by getting rid of duplicates and unnecessary files. Once that’s wrapped up, you’ll see me on here a lot more.

Jessica always has ravioli for the holidays

The daily calendar that sits on my desk is getting thin. Another year is wrapping up. Jess suggested including our blog addresses in the Christmas letter and writing our own notes online. You must have liked the idea.

As I first starting writing this post, Jessica and I just finished making ravioli for Christmas Eve. You can see some of our results pre-clean-up. The homemade goods are a family tradition that we’ve kept up – along with my family’s meatballs when we put up the tree.

This past year has been one filled with hard work. I dove into the remaining coursework I had to do to complete my graduate degree – finishing almost 60 percent of my classes this year. I’m looking forward to reading for pleasure again – and tackling projects that aren’t due at the end of the semester.

We cut back on trips – visiting Washington, D.C. twice, Columbus once, and Atlantic City once. We also returned to St. Marys for Thanksgiving. Yes, that’s a light year of trips – only five states, counting the one where I live. This might be the fewest number of states I visited in a year since high school.

I completed my second term as president of the local chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution. My final meeting brought out the largest turnout of chapter members in the last decade. We elected a new slate of officers, and they’ll do a great job taking over the chapter. I’m glad that I was able to stablize the chapter’s finances, recruit a new team of officers (and provide them with all the relevant information about the duties of their office), and overhaul and update the chapter roster. I’ve also continued and expanded my work with the Lackawanna Historical Society. I produce the Society’s quarterly newsletter, and I helped organize a database of previous newsletters as well as preparing program brochures for several events this past year.

Want to see more of what we did this year? Check out Jessica’s holiday post.

A recent death in my wife’s family sent me searching through files of genealogy. That reminded my of an unfinished project with those files. Half of her records are digital scans and the other half are photocopies. Some items are copies of relatives’ files and others are borrowed materials – things people will come inquiring about at some point.

I’ve tracked the items I hold and those I’m looking for in a spreadsheet. It functions like a checklist. When I find a census record, I delete from one spreadsheet and add it to the other. It lets me keep a running list of what I have on each person and what I need to find. It also lets me keep a list of all documents – I can quickly find all the birth records or grave locations that I’ve recorded.

This works, but I’m sure there are other, better ways to track what I have. I recently found this post about journals, logs, and calendars. Question for genealogists out there: what do you use to track the documents you’ve located. I’m not inquiring about different forms of ancestry charts necessarily – just different ways of keeping your “to-find” and “found” lists.

Bad customer service at Target. (I walked down to the aisle in time to catch the stock boy take the sale sign down. He told me he took it down. Not shopping there anymore.

What’s up with the Haiti seeds in Farmville?

You’ll have a long walk if you go to the Penn State game.

A worthwhile experiment – if you can remember to do it for a full month.

Pennsylvania’s new budget cuts funds for environmental projects.

On Thursday morning, they updated the forecast. This would be a decent storm. We’d be driving straight through the storm to get home on Friday night. Or we’d be driving across roads with as much as a foot of ice and snow that may or may not be plowed. I spent my lunch hour looking at weather projections and maps. We talked at 3:30 that afternoon – we’d leave town that night (pack quickly…) and drive south where the weather should be limited to rain.

I’d never had much success trying to outflank a weather pattern before. I’ve failed to outrun snow storms in the past. I’ve driven along the Texas countryside trying to get to a cross road and out of a tornado’s path. Last year, we were forced to land in Toledo and stuck overnight in Detroit while trying to get home after Christmas. But we pack and leave by 7 p.m.

We were most of the way to Harrisburg when we called Roger to ask about the forecast for Pittsburgh. Either we’d turn west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike or stay south and head for Hagerstown, Maryland depending on whether Pittsburgh would have freezing rain that night. The weather looked clear until 1 a.m. and would be just rain by 10 a.m. – easy set-up for crashing in a hotel room. We turned west on I-76 and set our sights on New Stanton – a place Franchise selected.

The road was pretty clear, the weather held, although I was tired and we pulled off one exit early – about 20 miles shy of our intended destination. I noticed the name of the county on the way in. A long time ago, a branch of my mom’s family lived in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Most of the family moved out after about 20 years. Only a few brothers stayed behind. I didn’t have any graves to search for and doubted there would be much paper record because the family left about 200 years ago.

We found the hotel and crashed for the night. Neither of us had heard of our jobs being closed the next day so we’d have to wake early to learn about the cancellations through text message or call off for the day. Franchise’s phone alarm sounded at 6:15 a.m. Within a few minutes, she received her cancellation text and rolled back over. I wasn’t cancelled so I spent a few minutes surfing the web on my Blackberry – learning a bit about the county’s history. That’s when I heard the buzzing – a quiet alarm sounding from the hallway. I rolled over to look at the alarm clock – dark. I flipped the bed lamp switch – nothing.Franchise slept blissfully in the bed – completely unaware. But I sat there thinking about my situation.I had never expected to find myself in Westmoreland County with no powern while rain poured outside while I tried to outsmart the seasonal weather.

Power was still out when Franchise woke so we considered our options. Donuts in the lobby and a dark bathroom. I grabbed my phone and Franchise’s GPS to Google and map the county historical society. Then I proposed an option to Franchise. We drive 20 miles to the historical society. Enjoy light, power, running water. I’d search their records for 30 minutes to see if they have anything pertaining to my family – anything that might encourage or dissuade me from visiting again. Then we’d get back on the road. Sometimes, when an opportunity is presented, you can’t let it go – particularly if it’s something you really enjoy doing.

Franchise didn’t sign up to leave Thursday night. She didn’t want to scamper out of Scranton wondering whether she would need to call in a sub for the next day. She didn’t want to be in a powerless hotel in Southwestern Pennsylvania. And she certainly didn’t want to spend the day in the archives somewhere while I did research. I could see the thoughts form in her head: Can’t he go anywhere without having to do genealogy research? She was gracious though. If there’s power, OK, she said. We checked the front desk. The hotel expected to be without power for the next 20 hours. The county seat had power. We packed the car and left.

Sure, I remembered the family name that resided in the area for 20-25 years. Bennetts. William, the patriarch, fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill and Yorktown. Isaac, his youngest son, is my direct ancestor. No clue on the dates or years they lived there or who was born, died, and married where. Totally unprepared and not expecting to parachute in to do anything with this family – particularly in a county where they resided for only a portion of their movement through the fledgling United States.

I walked into the Westmoreland County Historical Society with my laptop – full of all the family history scans I’ve collected – my brains for the day because I haven’t looked at this family in at least a year. The staff was nice – really helpful in digging up books and talking about the history of the area. I found a copy of a land deed from April 6, 1795 and a couple of mentions of the families that remained behind. Franchise read To Kill a Mockingbird. We stuck around about 90 minutes before hitting up the hotdog eatery on the corner and heading to Ohio.

The trip’s started with a lot of potential for a great story. Franchise and I have already decided that the Christmases since the wedding have been particularly adventuresome. We’re not done yet, but we made the best of a surprise situation.

Jess and I spent Saturday (her birthday) at Weaver’s Orchard near Reading where we picked 40 pounds of apples. (We picked an extra 3/4 pound of raspberries for good measure.) You might think that’s a lot of apples. Jess thought so – and she was only carrying half of them. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir5GRuc5UZs]

We spent Sunday baking (and stretching back to my Pennsylvania Dutch roots – saucing). Very experimental, but fun time. We had six kinds of apples – Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Empire, Jonathan, Jonagold (a cross between GD and Jonathan), and Cortland – and we made five different kinds of applesauce by tinkering with the apples involved.

Jess also made an apple pie and raspberry cheesecake. The oven was on overload, but it was relaxing to step away from daily activities.

And we won’t need to buy fruit at the grocery for a few months. What do 40 pounds of apples look like? 86 apples that cover the whole kitchen table.

We did get a few minutes for that tradition of eating the remains of your wedding cake after its gone stale and each ingredient should have expired. The results? Well, we ended up more focused on the camera and less on the cake. But I get to share the photos and story while Franchise puts together a class project. Who has the most fun? You do.

Franchise gets excited to eat cake for her first anniversary. Oh, if only she knew the fun to come…

Franchise bravely volunteers to try the first piece of cake.

She likes it! She goes for a full piece of cake.

But the cake might not be as good as we thought. The Franchise describes it as tasting like a plastic bag. I look at the face and remember the morning I woke her up too early…

Then we just start having fun with the camera. We kinda forget the cake and try to go all artsy with the photos.

Even Mr. Peanut gets an anniversary treat though.

Maybe some people are closer than others. The hair’s a little off. But look at this pair.