June 12, 2009 - New Hard-Drive and Great-Grandmother Marie - Part 1

Evening,

The PC is back. A new hard drive and cleaned... and polished, and ready to go. And the change was seamless! All I had to do was plug all my components in to the correct sockets and up-up-and-away. Thank-you to Bella for trying to be so involved in what I was doing.I shooed her away.

Bella, in the back, decided to join Tinker, in the front, sunbathing on the porch. (Thanks Ray for the touch-up.)

I did find a relatively new Trojan on my old hard-drive last week, "Trojan-pws-daonol". This Trojan had nothing to do with my hard-drive giving up it's ghost, so-to-speak. But it did do exactly what the numerous postings I read about it said it would do. On the day it arrived, it shut down and screwed up my PC audio system. The next part of the Trojan issue is that the dastardly spammer can remotely access a PC and copy out IDs and passwords. It is so new that a number of people in-the-know didn't even know about it. Don't know how it got in... I don't open strange emails or attachments and I have various levels of up-to-date firewalls... but it got in and did a number on my audio system... I was able to quarantine and eliminate the Trojan using Spy Sweeper. I ran Spy Sweeper a second time and Norton as a backup check, and both showed a follow-up non-existence and non-presence of the pain. I got rid of the Trojan and was able to reset my audio, which is now working better than ever.

And on to my genealogy. Why did great-grandmother Marie Abraham leave British Guiana and move to California?

When did she leave? How did she travel the approximate 4200 miles, 6730 kilometers or 3630 nautical miles? From Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) to San Diego, California, USA? Why did she take her youngest daughter, grandaunt Cecile with her? And again, why did she go? Was there someone there waiting for her?

Cousins Toni and Zoë had gathered a number of letters, photographs and a few documents that they had received from their Mother, my aunt Cecile. All-things-being-equal Aunt Cecile (née Smith) Olton may have been named for grandaunt Cecile (née Abraham) Ham. (Thanks David and Toni, to date I have not found another ancestor named Cecile, in my research.)


Taking the initial information that I was able to amass, I put together a descendant chart of my great-grandmother Marie (née July) Abraham. Bits and pieces of the puzzle began to take shape in the recreation of this family. Click on the descendant chart to see an enlarged depiction of the initial family information. Please note that this descendant chart will continue to evolve during the course of this research project.

An obituary from The Argosy, a Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) newspaper, dated 13 July 1901 stated that great-grandfather Fred Abraham "is survived by a widow and five children, the eldest of whom is a boy aged fourteen and the youngest is aged seven."

This information determined that great-grandmother Marie's eldest child, granduncle Frederick Henry, (aka, at times, Frederic Henri), was born about 1887. Her youngest and fifth child, probably grandaunt Cecile, may have been born according to the obituary around 1894.

Beginning with this information I then began the trek to get to know my great-grandmother Marie, the great-grandmother who passed away about 11 years before I was born. One thing that is almost definite is that my great-grandparents, Fred and Marie Abraham had five children, living in 1901; a son and four daughters. I noticed that The Argosy article does not mention the name of my great-grandmother or the five children... Curious?

Part 2 to follow,

Enjoy,

Jim