(Written on the 10th, 17th? And 19th)
70 years.
We’ve been looking for 70 years.
My granddad, my grandma, my aunt, my adopted aunt, my uncle, my mom, my siblings, and probably many many more. We’ve all tried to find them.
My family’s been looking for them since the ‘50s.
And today?
Well, I’ll get to that in a bit… 😁
It was a bit of a long night. The sickness that started to descend upon me last night began to hit harder through the night.
One of the things that sometimes happens when I get a head cold is that my teeth hurt, and overnight, my teeth did start to hurt. That wasn’t so much of a problem, except the specific area that was hurting was also the same area that’s been giving me tooth trouble for the last several weeks.
😅
So was the return of the tooth pain because I was sick? Or was it because after however long, I finally decided to do a bit of chewing on the left side of my mouth yesterday, and there actually is a more significant issue with my tooth?
That wasn’t officially ruled out by my dentist.
Or maybe it’s a combination of both? Or maybe another cause entirely?
🤷
When I finally got up for the last time, I listened to my morning uplifting music and then headed over to AutoZone to pick up the washer pump I ordered yesterday, crossing my fingers that somehow all the testing that seemed to indicate a more complicated electrical issue wasn’t what it seemed, and the new washer pump actually would resolve the issue. 🤞
I then stopped off at Walmart to grab coolant for the tractor, dish soap (as I think it’s a better degreaser for my hair when using hard water than regular soap 🙃), and some cold medicine.
I don’t generally like to take medicine of any kind, but… it’s been a discouraging couple of days in some other areas (several things going sideways), and I was hoping for some relief at least in this area. 🤞
After shopping and arriving back at my mom’s place, I was quite grateful to find that the new washer pump resolved Happy’s non-squirting issues. 🥳
🙏¹
I’m not sure what to make of that situation, but I’ll take it!
Clearly, the pump wasn’t working, as I’d tried to jump it yesterday, and it hadn’t worked with both power and ground applied directly to it; but I was also getting wacko readings from the electrical system, so I was concerned a short might have blown the old pump and might do the same thing to the new one.
It wasn’t a very expensive pump, so I wasn’t incredibly concerned if the new one shorted out, but I’m still super grateful that it fixed the issue.
The only reason I can think of for getting the wacko electrical readings is that either the data everyone online was giving was incorrect, which seems a little odd, or there’s some kind of a sensor in the vehicle that detects when the pump is connected and checks to see that the voltage is what it’s supposed to be?
🤷
Next time maybe I’ll just back probe the connector instead of disconnecting it to do my testing. 🤔
After getting that taken care of, I went back in the house and shared the happy news with my mom, and then we both sort of started working on genealogy stuff again (It wasn’t a planned thing. We just started working on it again), and that’s when it happened.
As you know, I had been doing a whole bunch of research last night trying to find solid connections between our Betsey Carter and the William Carter family I started digging that seemed so promising.
The people who created the family trees connected us, but they also had exactly zero sources as evidence posted to support the connections they’d made (odd because they had exact birth and death dates for several peeps). 🤔
But then my Mom remembered something… a gravestone she’d seen and photographed when wandering the Chatham cemetery in Medina County, Ohio with my Aunt Heather (we might return to that cemetery this fall 😁).
Joel Carter.
Well guess what? The family trees of these two tree posters listed a Joel as a brother of Betsey!
Seemed like a pretty big coincidence for Joel Carter to be buried in the same township cemetery multiple states away from where Betsey had grown up.
And then the kicker… It wasn’t too long later that another memory flashed in my mom’s mind, and she went to the old family photos she’s digitized and found an old family picture where Mary Frances (granddaughter of Betsey by adoption) had labeled the picture “Uncle Joel Carter.”
🥳
🥳🎉🥳
With that, we both felt like we’d finally made our connection. We still needed to find legal documents connecting peeps, but I think we’ve got it!
After 70ish years. 🥳
🙏²
Mom made a wonderful hootenanny pancake for a late breakfast, and we enjoyed that. Thx, mama. 🙏³
I took my cold medicine, but my head felt like a watermelon, and my nose was running like a faucet.
Thinking my sister Heather would love to hear about the genealogical breakthrough (because she gets excited about that kind of stuff 😊), I gave her a call to tell her the wonderful news. 😁
She was totally exhausted when I first called, but by the end of the conversation, she was super excited for the successes.
So cool.
It’s thought provoking… here I am, in 2026, writing all the time, putting so. much. of my life out there as a permanent record, while those who lived 200 years ago… there’s so little!
And they have stories, hard ones. William and Betsey never had any of their own children, for example.
Nor have I. That’s hard for me.
How hard might that have been for them. Maybe they longed for children and couldn’t have any of their own and then rejoiced in the opportunity to adopt RJ.
Anyway, pretty cool to feel like we’re making a breakthrough. 🙏⁴
I’m actually not even blood related to William and Betsey. It’s RJ, their adopted daughter, who’s the blood ancestor, but I have an adopted aunt who was an incredible aunt to me. 🤍 🙏⁵🤍
Moving on…
I spent a good little while finishing a first draft of a brief biographical sketch of what I’d learned about all the potential connections, sharing it with my mom and my sister Heather.
At some point, neighbor Dan called to ask about my travel schedule to see if he had time to use my dump trailer to load up and then haul off a bunch of stuff. I told him that my goal was to sell it, because I’m tired of paying the property taxes on it, so he offered to pay my property tax bill if he could keep using it. 🙃
Thx, Dan. 🙏⁶
After procrastinating leaving my mom’s place until I had procrastinated to the point that I was going to be late, I finally headed to the Hill (I had told Jim I was going to meet him there about 3:00 to get started unloading his stuff off my trailer).
Once there, I first checked up on the burn barrel that I had left with coals in it the other night, and to my surprise, I don’t think it had settled at all?
That was a little disappointing, but I guess I packed it down so hard that the coals underneath couldn’t get air, so they couldn’t continue their thermochemical reaction. 🙃
The barrel was still quite warm on top (and I didn’t risk testing how hot it was down below).
After checking the barrel, I put a little more air in my CNG van’s tire and moved my van to the place next to the storage barn where I had been cleaning up the other day (the day I stepped on the nail). It makes a lot more sense to have it parked next to the storage barn than other places (although, hopefully, I’ll have it sold soon, so it won’t be there for long 🤞).
After moving the van, I started working on running the ignition-switch bypass wires on the tractor, aiming to follow the main wiring harness down from the ignition switch toward the starter, as it provided the most efficient use of wire length.
That was important because I only had a small amount of the gauge of wire I felt was large enough to handle the heavy duty load going through it for the starting circuit in a beefy tractor engine. I had one piece that was maybe about 5 ft long, and another that was only maybe 3 and 1/2 ft long, and I needed both. At first, it didn’t look like the 3 and 1/2 ft long piece would reach where I needed it to go, but following the wiring harness, I had a chance.
As I worked on it, I was having trouble snaking the thick wire through the right spaces, and Jim came over to try to help a bit.
Jim suggested a route that was a lot easier to feed the wire through, but I was concerned that the shorter wire wouldn’t reach if we went the easier route. I also hoped to follow the original harness bundle, as that seemed like the the most likely route to keep the wires as safe as possible from external damage.
Since we had two different jobs to do, and I didn’t mind fighting with the wiring, I suggested Jim unload the trailer. So he went and got the forks put on the big tractor and used those to unload the stuff he had on my trailer.
On my end, after battling with the wiring for a fair little bit, I finally managed to string the two fat wires down along the main wiring harness path, through the moisture barrier, and down and around through the firewall to the starter. 🥳
🙏⁷
I then spent the next, I don’t even know how long, probably hour or two? zip tying the wires in place, putting a protective cover over one part that seemed a bit more vulnerable to damage, finding suitable electrical parts from my stash, wrapping other exposed sections with electrical tape, and making sure everything was in a position that I felt decent about as a longer-term solution and not just a quick emergency fix.
In the end, it turned out rather well, I think. I enlarged a hole that was already pre-drilled in one of the steering/dash trim panels, and that worked out perfectly as a place to mount the little waterproof push-button start switch. 🙏⁸
Gratefully, I noticed that the start switch had one terminal that was designated hot all the time 🙏⁹, so I made sure to get that wired up properly by ohming out the wiring from down by the starter up to the switch.
Once it was finally wired up, I gave it a go, and to my delight and gratitude, the tractor fired up without any hesitation whatsoever, the push-button switch working perfectly. 🥳
🙏¹⁰
I sent Jim a little video to show him how it worked, and I was in the process of amending the video with a second since I realized I hadn’t given all the info necessary (It’s a direct bypass switch. That means you don’t have to even have the clutch in to press the button and engage the starter. Meaning that if you press the button while the tractor is in gear, then it’s going to try and move while you’re cranking. 😅
No clutch safety switch in the circuit to stop that from happening. 🙃
But that’s okay. Generally, people don’t try to start something unless the clutch is depressed anyway, or unless they’ve checked to make sure it’s in neutral, as normally it won’t even attempt to start unless it’s in neutral or the clutch is in, so hopefully it’ll be ok.)
Jim walked over as I was about to record the follow-up video, so I just showed him.
I also let Mike know, but he was super busy trying to get ready for their trip tomorrow (He and Jim are driving down to Florida to help my nephew Blade with his house).
After showing Jim the repairs and walking him through some minor damage that was done in the repair process (I think Mike accidentally broke a piece of plastic trim, and you probably remember all those darn little plastic relay housings that crumbled and broke simply trying to remove and reinsert the relays in the fuse box).
Old plastic.
With Jim heading out of town, I also wanted to make sure that we got the mower swapped over from the big tractor to the small tractor. I’ve never actually operated the big tractor, and generally, whenever possible, Jim likes to have all the mowing done with the small tractor. So we got that swapped over, Jim doing most of the work (because he knew what to do, and I didn’t).
After that, I chatted a little bit with Andrés. He’s absolutely killing it in his business ventures (the dump truck stuff, and other things as well. Super cool). 🙏¹¹
He was struggling a little bit with a weed eater and asked if I could help him figure it out, so I popped off the cap and found the string was perhaps a little too short (one of the string ends had sucked its way back up inside the weed eater head). I needed more trimmer line to fix it, and though Jim probably has some, I know I’ve got some with all my stuff down at my storage shed.
After straightening things up a bit, despite being sick, I might or might not have decided to go to the Walmart Neighborhood Market, buy, and then down, (while still in the parking lot), an entire 48 oz tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
😶
Because that’ll help me feel better. 🙃
…Gosh, why can’t I lose this pesky weight. 😆
You know, aaaaaactually, downing all that ice cream did help 😆. I’ve had melon head all day, but the ice cream cleared up my sinuses a little bit.
😁
I think I mentioned my nose has been running like a faucet all day, so I’ve been shoving toilet paper up both nostrils to keep from having to blow my nose every 14 seconds (which was rubbing my skin raw).
Anyway, I did buy bananas when I bought the ice cream. So… that’s something, right? 😆
Back at my Mom’s house, I continued working a little bit on genealogy stuff, and I also spent a good while working on my file cleanup efforts. Tens of thousands of recovered files to go through still. 😅
I think it’s mostly a waste of time, unfortunately, as the files I hoped to recover seem to nearly all be corrupted, and all the rest I think are pretty much files that I didn’t need, either because I didn’t want them, or because I already had copies of them.
Oh well. Is what it is.
I’m still gonna finish going through them because I don’t know what I might not have copies of. That said, it’s gonna be simpler to save what’s salvageable and search for duplicates later than to search file by file for duplicates now.
I think mom and I finally had evening prayer maybe around 11:00? And I wandered out to my van, where I spent a good long time on my phone looking at stuff on Facebook Marketplace, I think.
Very productive day today. I’m not getting the things done that I was wanting to get done (getting my equipment sold, for example, but whatever. My truck is sold, and Dan offered to pay my property taxes for the year, so I’m pretty much golden. I still want to get rid of my stuff, so it’s not always on the to-do list, and so the money all that equipment represents isn’t just sitting there wasting away but can actually be utilized.
Having everything multiple states away adds to the stress.
At this point, if I could just get my van figured out and sold, that would be a big deal.
Of everything, that van feels the most like a noose around my neck. I feel like to get rid of it, I’m going to have to basically sell it for almost nothing (like the Golden Kiwi), because it’s just not desirable.
But I’ll roll with it, whatever “it” turns out to be. 🙃
😅
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 