Getting Ready to Start Vlogging

Well I guess vlogging is a word, it wasn't when I was a kid, but neither were videos.  I guess that means I am old.  😉

Roy and I, are getting ready for our trip and are leaving on Tuesday morning for Kansas City.  When we leave Kansas City we will be driving around the states of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and probably Tennessee before all is said and done.  We will be doing a lot of visiting with family, mainly my side, as well as stopping to see the lands and cemeteries where some of our ancestors lived, died and were buried along the way.

On Tuesday evening we will start off by meeting with some of Roy's relatives who he has never meet before.  Roy and Wayne are just second cousins on the Kerby side of their family, their mothers were first cousins.  However, Wayne's mother married when she was 17 and within a couple of years or so they left Arizona and never lived there again.  Both their Mom's are now deceased but they would have know each other, probably very well, as they were both born just a year apart in the same little town of Webb in southeastern Arizona, about a mile apart from each other.  My mother-in-law, Elnora's mother was Mary Myrtle Kerby and Wayne's mother, Rachel's father was Joseph Kerby. Myrtle and Joe were siblings and children of Francis Kerby III and Rachel Isabel Riggs.

While we drive across Missouri we will be stopping in Monroe, Lincoln, Ralls and St. Charles Counties in eastern Missouri, just north of St. Louis, where the Riggs family lived having moved into Missouri from Kentucky in about 1809.  Rachel Isabel Riggs father, was Nathaniel Riggs and he owned close to 400 acres just south of Florida, Missouri the little town where Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was born.  I have gone to the BLM site and located the plat maps showing Nathaniel's property as well as his brother, Jonathan's property and some of their brother-in-law's properties as well.  So we are going to be walking around the land the Riggs family walked almost 200 years ago.

The father of Nathaniel and Jonathan Riggs was the Rev. Bethuel Riggs who started the Sulphur Lick Baptist Church sometime around 1813 or 1823, both dates have been given in different histories I have found. Bethuel started the church in his own home and just a few years later around 1827 or 1828 they built a church house just 4 miles west of Bethuel's home on Davis Road. That church is still there with another church house built in 1856 at the same spot. We are planning on going there too to see the church, which is still being used, while we are in the area.

Bethuel Riggs was suppose to have owned some land too, but so far I have not been able to locate it. I am assuming at this time that he may have just lived on his son, Jonathan's land which was just about 7 miles north of the town of Troy, Missouri and the church house is about 9 miles northwest of Troy.

On Wednesday I will be meeting for a lunch a distant cousin of mine from the Stout side of my Mom's side of the family.  We have talked on the phone before but we have never meet in person.

Each day I will try and write up a little something for this blog and post videos as I can, most may have to wait until we get back home, but we shall see.

While in Kentucky I will be visiting with my Mom's 3 sisters, Barbara, Amy and Iva and their families and with my Dad's 2 brothers, George and Bobby and their families.  I have already given them a heads up that I would be asking them questions and videoing taping them for my new vlog.

As time permits I will also be visiting other family as well.  Also, videos at cemeteries, the ferry from Marion over to Cave-in-Rock, Garden of the Gods in Southern Illinois and anything else I think might be of interest.

To start this vlogging off I thought I would post the video I did back in 2012 when I was in Kentucky. It is of the old house my Daddy, his parents and siblings lived in 1940, just past the old Love Graveyard in Crittenden County, Kentucky.  Make sure you click on this link here are the link to the right of this post that says, My Vlog "I Dig My Roots & Branches" to see this video and all the others I will be posting.  All the videos I do during this trip and any other trips will be posted there.

Come along on our little adventures into the past.