Ancestry

One week from today is my dad's 89th birthday. Other than some hearing loss, arthritic range-of-motion loss, and increasingly unreliable short-term memory, he's a pretty healthy fellow. We're planning to travel to Kansas to celebrate with him.

At that point, I'll be sure to tell you about the wonders and delights that one can experience while driving across western Kansas on I-70...but today's topic is the result of a request my father recently made. He was wondering about the status of one of his relatives who was about the same age, and asked me to find out if the guy was still around. In the process of the subsequent Internet research, my interest in the Heggy genealogy project was rekindled.

I had started a Family Tree project several years ago, and had traced a couple of the family lines back to Europe in the 1400s. Unfortunately, my hard drive crashed, and my only backup of the data was on a spare hard drive. Normally, you'd think that having a backup on a spare hard drive would be adequate, but the warranty repair technician that Dell sent over decided to reformat my backup drive as well as the primary.

A word of advice: never let a repair guy touch your backup drive. Physically remove it from the machine before he arrives, and hide it in the kitchen cabinet behind the Spaghetti-Os. Oh, and also make backups on a CD or DVD regularly. Remember the First Law of Computing: All hard drives will eventually crash.

Well, OK, that might be the second law. I think the first one was "Buy Microsoft stock in 1978." But you get the idea -- do your backups.

Anyway, I was hoping to reconstuct as much of the genealogy chart as I could before the trip back to visit my dad. I thought he might enjoy seeing a printout of his family tree, and learning more about some of our interesting ancestors.

Here are some of the tidbits I've discovered:

• Heggie's Rock, near Appling Georgia, was named after my great-to-the-4th Uncle Archibald Heggie. As far as I can tell, all he did to merit his name appearing on this landmark was to marry the daughter of the dude who owned the land containing the rock. And the rock itself is merely noteworthy because, well...it's a really big rock. With trees growing out of it.


• A completely different uncle Archibald, a speculator in tobacco futures in the early 1800s, was shot while being robbed by highwaymen while walking home from a card game. He recovered, and almost a year to the day later, was shot and robbed again while walking home from the local tavern. He survived that one, too, and hopefully learned his lesson about wandering around after dark with money hanging out of his pockets.


• A contemporary of Uncle Archibald's -- L.A. "Tobe" Heggie -- was fatally shot during a dispute with a neighbor. According to the newspaper reports, he emptied his gun in the general direction of his foe, and then shouted out that he was out of bullets and would therefore like to end the dispute amiably. Apparently, the neighbor was disinclined to do so.


• A fellow named J.L. "Handsome" Heggy married a 19-year-old girl on his 60th birthday. I was unable to find any information about what happened after that, so I'll just assume that he lived happily ever after.

Another relative was arrested for operating a moonshine still, my great grandfather was on a posse that chased Butch Cassidy, and another ancestor was a regionally-renowned tailor. I was unaware that there were such things as regionally-renowned tailors, so this research has been educational indeed.

I still don't know exactly how the family got from Scotland to North Carolina, or from North Carolina to Illinois...or why any of them ever thought that moving to Kansas was a good idea. And I'm still trying to find the connection between myself and the dude that makes the delicious chocolates, but I'm sure I'll figure it all out at some point. In the meantime, though, you can bet I'm doing my backups. I hope you are, too.