Saturday we flew in to Charlotte, NC where we rented a car and drove north to Galax, VA and spent 3 days. Galax is the area that my maternal grandmother lived from the age of 7 until 16 and there are still many relatives in the area. Mom and I throughly enjoyed our visit that included hearing stories and touring the old homestead areas. By midweek we were in Richmond, VA where we spent a full day doing genealogy research in the state library. By Friday evening we were in Durham, NC where we lived from my 6th grade year through my freshman year in college. On Mother’s Day we attended Sunday School and worship service at our old church in Durham and we were blessed with great visits with old friends. Monday we flew back to Oklahoma City.
This 9 day vacation with my Mom will always be a treasure full of memories to me. Here are just a few pics from our visit in Galax:
The old homestead of Tommy Lineberry near Galax, VA.
My great, great grandfather, George Lineberry, had many acres of land that he divided among his children. Baxter is proudly lying on some of that land that is owned by George’s descendants through his son Tommy.
Known as Pot Rock on Crooked Creek near Galax, VA. My great grandfather Jacob W. Lineberry was one of many baptized here through the years.
What an interesting day May 2 was! I received 2 sets of family history items both from my father’s side of the family. One set included some letters and photos from my grandfather’s uncle’s family the other set was from my father that included letters, photos, memorabilia and more. It was like Christmas to me.
Among those items that belonged to my grandparents, I did snap a picture I’ll show you today. On one side it says “5 For Old Age Assistance 5″ and the other side says “Sales Tax Token Oklahoma”. It feels like it’s made of thin but sturdy cardboard type paper.
In looking up information, I discovered two sites that provided helpful information.
1) What are Sales Tax Tokens? said “Merchants had to pay sales tax to the state on the total amount of sales made by the merchant during each day’s sales. You can imagine that if the sales tax rate is 3% and a child buys a 10c piece of candy there is no way to collect the three-tenths of one cent. If you rounded down that meant that the merchant could not collect anything for the tax. If you rounded up the state was gaining 7 tenths of a cent on every 10 cent sale. You can see that if the merchant sold 100 pieces of candy he was loosing 30 cents a day in tax revenues to the state, so the token was born. This allowed the merchant to take 11 cents for the first piece of candy and give change back in mills. The next time you wanted to buy a 10c candy you could present the merchant with the 10c and a token and complete the transaction. This allowed the merchant to collect the sales tax on each transaction.A mill is 1/1000th of a dollar or a tenth of a cent. As you can imagine, people did not like having to carry a second set of coins, and to further complicate matters, different states issued different tax tokens. 1 and 5 mills are the most common denominations, but other denominations include: 1/5 cent, 1 1/2 mills, and “Tax on 10c or less.”
2) 4.29.09 Tax Tokens (Mills) said “…a tax token (mill) was in 1936 when Oklahoma enacted such a law. One mill was made of aluminum and about the size of a quarter with a hole in the center. The first ones were inscribed “Consumers Tax Check Oklahoma” on both sides. A five mill token made of brass was also issued. For every 10¢ purchase, one mill token was also collected. A 20¢ purchase took two mills on up to one penny or 10 mills was required for a dollar purchase. A short time later the inscription on one side of the mill was changed to “For Old Age Assistance” and the word “Check” on the other side was changed to “Token”.
In 1942, the mill was produced from molded white fiber and the 5 mill in grey fiber without a hole. Later, the 5 mill was provided in an orange to red to brown fiber. In 1942, to support the war effort, light grey and red-brown cardboard was used to produce the tokens. The tax was finally ended in 1952.”
Interesting!
It was a week of fast travel all around. Sunday I took a flight to Denver and by Tuesday afternoon I was on another plane for Burbank and yet another plane headed back home late by Wednesday night. While in Denver on April 22 it snowed!
Thankfully, while in Burbank the weather was dryer and warmer, although not gorgeous.
Thursday I met my Dad at McDonald’s where I had my first Frappé Mocha. Both the drink and the visit were certainly nourishing for my soul.
Getting to the lake Friday evening was a bit more involved than some of our trips. While Keith was putting Purrkins in the back of the van he unknowingly dropped his wallet in the parking lot of the restaurant. When we stopped for gas many miles down the road he discovered he had no wallet. Thankfully, the restaurant had it. On the way back to get the wallet, a bottle of ammonia in the back of the van spilled on the carpet. By that time I was ready for that ‘adventure’ to end.
The next day, Keith put up a hand rail on the porch at the lake and we both did several odds and ends of tasks. Since my Dad was already at Lake Texoma on a fishing trip, he stopped for a brief visit and got to see our place.
Later that day our huge pile of brush was burning nicely and I sat in a lawn chair and enjoyed the wonderful evening breeze.
In case you’re curious about how much wood we have from cutting all those tree limbs down a few weeks ago, here’s a picture of most of it although some of it has already been given away.
Once we got back home Sunday I resumed planning an upcoming genealogy trip with my Mom to North Carolina and Virginia. More on that next week.
All of footage that has been converted into a digital format.
A few weeks ago Keith borrowed some family films from his cousins to have it converted to a digital format. There is a total of 4 hours of film, one portion is from 1939 and the 8mm film is from about 1962-1966 then there is some 58mm film with sound from about 1978 & 1979. As you may have guessed by now, this week I began my task of assembling this into chronological order and eliminating the bad portions so that we can get the family together and learn who is in the footage and circumstances of the events. There is footage of Keith’s paternal grandparents, his parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. I’m excited about the outcome but the process will be laborious.
Here’s a portion featuring Keith, when he was about 2 1/2 years old, and his father while the family was stationed in the Philippines. Keith’s uncle visited them and thankfully brought his camera so we have this film today.
Keith and I got up Saturday morning and worked all day plus a good bit of Sunday picking up tree limbs. Thankfully, we were able to borrow a neighbor’s small flatbed trailer so that we could load more without having to lift the branches up and into the truck bed. Saturday the burn pile slowly burned down as we continually added to it but Sunday the branches never did really burn so we left a huge pile for later along with about 18 stacks of firewood. It was exhausting, physical labor and I’m sore.
Early Saturday evening with my camera in hand I walked around our yard and noticed a butterfly on some lavender colored blooms. The butterfly was about the size of the palm of my hand and stayed busy with the blooms allowing me to photograph it. Below are some views I saw this weekend.
Apr 9
This gallery contains 23 photos.
In Kingston you can rent a genie boom by the day and that’s what Keith did in order to get high enough up to reach the limbs on the trees that were dying or limiting the sunshine. We’ve been trying to get the grass to grow in our grove area at the lake for years […]
At some point something must have been glued to the side of the shower and it got ripped off leaving an unsightly spot. Last weekend Keith put 2 coats of primer on it and one top coat but since it was so humid he had to finish painting this weekend. These two photos, taken with my iPhone, show the before and after one top coat, it looks much better now.
Last year we took our analog TV to the lake place and, using a converter box and rabbit ears were able to get good reception. I want to be able to hook up to my iPad to watch movies and show my photos but that requires a different set up. So, we bought a digital TV and thankfully it was on sale. We get 6 TV channels now and all you have to use is one remote instead of 3 to operate it. When I download my photos to my iPad I just plug it into the TV and all my photos are visible on the big, sleek screen!
Keith getting ready to install the TV in the den
We took a trip into Durant this weekend, which requires us to drive across the narrow and long Roosevelt bridge (built in 1942, it is the longest highway span bridge in Oklahoma). That bridge allows us to go places we might otherwise not reach. Interestingly, events of my week are beautifully symbolized by this bridge. Notice how low the lake is right now; we definitely appreciate the rain we’ve been getting.
It’s a shame that I didn’t take any photos with my camera to get more pleasing photos. Maybe next weekend.
More information on the Roosevelt Bridge:
After spending several laborious hours moving my blog from posterous to wordpress and then figuring out how to convert the html to pdf so that it looked okay to print, the bound copy arrived today. I used blogbooker.com to convert the html to pdf and Lulu.com to print it. It looks just as I thought it would, imperfections and all.
Saturday was a gorgeous day with record breaking temperatures around the nation and in Shay, Oklahoma (near Lake Texoma) it was 79 degrees.
Everything is coming to life! The bees, wasps, gophers, etc were eager to move about.
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